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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23984689">By Permission of Heaven</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImprobableDreams900/pseuds/ImprobableDreams900'>ImprobableDreams900</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman &amp; Terry Pratchett</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Action/Adventure, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Guilt, Historical, Historical Accuracy, Hurt/Comfort, London, Pre-slash if you like, Really not that angsty by my standards but ya know, Suspense, The Great London Fire of 1666, oblivious idiots in love</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 19:56:11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>31,585</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23984689</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImprobableDreams900/pseuds/ImprobableDreams900</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s 1666, and London is burning.</p><p>Meanwhile, Crowley grapples with a greater question: Is it possible for an angel to stand before the smouldering ruins of an innocent city and remain friends with the person who lit the match?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Aziraphale &amp; Crowley (Good Omens)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>101</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>146</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Amazing Good Omens</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. The Seven Deadly Sins of London</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Welcome to the end of days! Bit late posting this, but back when the world entered quarantine, I thought to myself, ‘What does a person in the midst of a catastrophe want to read about, but another catastrophe?’ So here we are. :D</p><p>I’ve had this idea on the back burner for a long while, mostly because I somehow managed to complete three separate research projects about the Great Fire of London in undergrad, lol. So when I say it is well-researched, I well and truly mean that. Entire books were read. Museums were visited. Wikipedia articles were rewritten.</p><p>I’m tagging this as both Book! and TV! Omens but it’s really a sort of mix of both. Aziraphale and Crowley are based on the book, but are close enough to their TV personalities that you could mentally swap them for the TV characters if you liked. Meanwhile, I pilfered Gabriel and Beelzebub from the TV show because they just make it so easy to pilfer them, ya know? The world’s underlying framework is based on the book, with the main difference from TV canon being that the whole ‘demons in churches walk like they’re on hot sand’ thing does not apply.</p><p>If you’re familiar with some of my other work, you may know that there’s a short flashback-style scene about the Great Fire of London in my fic <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/9594254/chapters/21684077">Don’t Play With Holy Water</a>. I decided to write this story independently of that, so don’t expect the plot to line up. :)  Also, I’ve elected to deviate from my usual headcanon of ‘an angel/demon who is out of power when discorporated dies permanently’ just for the sake of streamlining the story.</p><p>Read on!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>Oh London, London, sinful as Sodom &amp; Gomorrah, the Decree is gone out <em>Repent</em> or <em>Burn.</em></p>
</blockquote><p>—Walter Gostelo, “The Coming of God in Mercy and Vengeance, Beginning with Fire…”, 1658</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>October 21, 1604</em>
</p><p>Atop the limestone roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem sat an unusual pair. They faced each other across a small, perfectly square, perfectly smooth table, which had not been there a moment before.</p><p>Neither had the two human-shaped beings seated there, resting on chairs that were brilliant white and jet black, respectively.</p><p>The being on the white chair looked coolly over at his opposite, violet eyes unyielding. Far beneath his chair and slightly behind him, buried beneath the very foundations of the church, lay the tomb where Christ had been raised from the dead. “Beelzebub.”</p><p>“Gabriel, pleazed to zee you again,” buzzed Beelzebub with a slightly snide smile. Beneath her chair, also buried deep beneath the church’s foundations, lay Calvary, where Christ had been crucified and, before that, where Adam himself had died.</p><p>The selection of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as a meeting place had not been accidental.</p><p>“Another century gone,” Gabriel said by way of preamble, straightening the fashionable grey sleeve of his doublet with disinterest. “Let’s make this brief. I have better things to do than remain corporeal down…here<em>.</em>”</p><p>To emphasis his point, Gabriel sniffed and cast a derisive look around the limestone roof of the church, a relatively flat expanse except for a low stone wall edging the perimeter and the emerging tops of the church’s domes. The closest of said domes was covered with bird poo.</p><p>“Do you dizlike ze zmell?” Beelzebub asked in a mocking tone, tilting her head. The movement dislodged a cloud of flies from her matted black hair, and they began zipping around her head in apparent distress.</p><p>“It is irrelevant,” Gabriel dismissed, turning his attention fully to his counterpart. “Speak. What does Hell have planned for this century?”</p><p>“The uzual,” Beelzebub buzzed, sitting back slightly in her jet-black chair. “Continued plague, petty warz in Europe, and widezpread dizaffection with governmentz. What will Heaven be about?”</p><p>Gabriel gave Beelzebub a shrewd look, as though mistrusting her words. “Restoration of a unified Church. Consolidation of India under a central authority. Continued baptism into the faith.”</p><p>“More mizzionariez, then?” Beelzebub asked with a frown. “I exzpect you’ll want greater reign in the New World?” Her frown deepened. “…<em>Again?”</em></p><p>Gabriel stiffened. “Are you insinuating—”</p><p>“I’m juzt zaying, we laid off it lazt zentury and look how far you’ve got.”</p><p>Gabriel looked decidedly displeased now. “That was through no fault of our—”</p><p>“I do not care whoze fault it waz,” Beelzebub interrupted with a wave of her hand. “If you expect Hell to leave half ze world in your handz for another zentury, you will need to trade zomething for it.”</p><p>Gabriel frowned and narrowed his eyes at Beelzebub for a long moment. From the streets below them rose the sounds of the regular hustle and bustle of the city, along with a few angry shouts from bystanders who had evidently spotted the pair trespassing on the roof of the holy building. “What did you have in mind?”</p><p>“A zpecial project,” Beelzebub answered immediately. “Zome of the demonz need a bit of a…field trip. Getting cooped up down zere, you underztand.”</p><p>Gabriel folded his arms. “What kind of ‘special project’?”</p><p>“Don’t worry, zere’z zomezing in it for you, too,” Beelzebub said, and reached for something in the folds of her cloak.</p><p>To his credit, Gabriel didn’t flinch at the movement, instead remaining impassive as Beelzebub drew forth a folded sheet of parchment. She put it on the grey table and slid it across to the centre. She retracted her hand and looked at Gabriel expectantly. A fly landed on the edge of the table and started cleaning its long, spindly forelegs.</p><p>Gabriel scowled for a moment more and then uncrossed his arms long enough to reach over and snatch up the parchment. He unfolded it, eyes scanning the freshly printed letters stamped across its surface.</p><p>THE SEUEN DEADLY SINNES OF LONDON, read the title. It was the frontispiece of a pamphlet of some sort, a Thomas Decker listed as the author.</p><p>“A fortzcoming publication,” Beelzebub explained. “Our agent in London haz found the zity to be rife with all manner of evil. Zo we exzpect you will not mind if we take care of it.”</p><p>Gabriel looked up sharply, eyes narrowing. “And what do you mean by <em>that</em>, fiend?”</p><p>“Now, now, no need for namez,” Beelzebub replied in a hurt-sounding voice, leaning back slightly and moving a hand to her chest in mock offense. “Ze zity will be burned. Az iz Hell’z way.”</p><p>Gabriel looked down at the pamphlet, considering.</p><p>“Zey are not godly people,” Beelzebub said dismissively. “It iz a good plaze for zuch a…project.”</p><p>Gabriel set the pamphlet delicately back down on the table, his fingers adjusting its edges until it was perfectly straight. “And in return, no interference in the New World?”</p><p>“Ah,” Beelzebub said, raising a finger. “No interferenze with <em>mizzionariez</em> in ze New World, zame az lazt time.”</p><p>Gabriel frowned again, the expression appearing permanently etched onto his face. But, beneath it, he seemed pleased. It was, after all, a small price to pay. “Deal.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>September 1, 1666</em>
</p><p>Despite ostensibly being a bastion of Heavenly power on Earth, Crowley had always liked St Paul’s Cathedral. Perhaps it was because there was really very little of Heaven in it. After all, it was humans who had envisioned the cathedral, dedicated the necessary time and resources to its creation, built it up brick by brick, and maintained and renovated it over the years. To Crowley, it seemed more a monument to the imagination and perseverance of <em>humanity</em> than to anything or anyone else.</p><p>And, looking at it now, it seemed to have even less of Heaven going on than usual.</p><p>From where Crowley sat perched on one of the low stone walls ringing the cathedral’s churchyard, he watched with amusement as a never-ending stream of magistrates, lords and their well-to-do wives, lawyers, shopkeepers, marriage-brokers, pickpockets, drunkards, beggars, and even prostitutes found their way through the grand doors into the church’s nave.</p><p>Inside, Crowley knew, was a fine example of humanity making good use of a large, well-ventilated space in the midst of an obnoxiously long heatwave. By this time of day, the body of the church would have transformed itself into an ad hoc business hub for the rich and poor alike. The lengthy nave—still referred to as Paul’s Walk despite its decidedly non-ecclesiastical uses these days—was the premier destination in the city for anyone looking to get a bit of juicy gossip, buy the latest miracle remedy or autumn fashion, or even just shave a few minutes off their afternoon stroll.</p><p>But even without the added bonus of the bustle of humanity, it was truly a lovely building all by itself. It was over four hundred years old, and the Gothic flying buttresses and crocketed finials recalled the heights of Crowley’s favourite architectural style, which now belonged to days gone by. Sadly, the proud cathedral had fallen into a state of disrepair lately, a situation shown most prominently by the loss of its spire, which had been struck by lightning nearly a century earlier and hadn’t been replaced. But even without the spire, the square stone tower that had once borne it remained impressive, rising up over the crossing of the church’s four wings and towering over the rest of the city.</p><p>Fortunately for the cathedral, Londoners had been taking a more vested interest in its preservation lately, and the building was currently surrounded by a forest of scaffolding.</p><p>From his place perched on the low stone wall, Crowley took a lazy bite of the cream-filled <em>pâte à choux</em> pastry in his hand. He took a moment to enjoy the mixture of sweet cream and flaky, fluffy bread, tapping the backs of his heels against the low stone wall as he did so. He’d bought the pastry from a nearby bakery that had recently started experimenting with French baking methods, building on the larger trend towards French sauces and stews. Though Crowley didn’t have a particularly strong sweet tooth himself, he knew someone who did, and he liked to keep abreast of all the fine dining options in the city.</p><p>Crowley took his time finishing the pastry, carefully evaluating it all the while. When he had finished, he hopped down from the wall, stretched in a way that indicated he had entirely the wrong number of bones, and meandered towards the edge of the churchyard, wiping the crumbs from his fingers on his trouser leg as he went.</p><p>He was just passing the charnel house when a shiver of warning raced up his spine, followed a heartbeat later by a low voice buzzing from the direction of the small stone outbuilding, its nearest side swathed in shadow.</p><p>“Crooowley.”</p><p>Crowley jumped before he could stop himself and then hastily glanced around as he stepped closer to the voice. No one else in the churchyard seemed to be paying him any mind, so he turned his attention to the patch of darkness cast by the charnel house. While the placement of the building’s shadow was natural for the time of day, there was an extra depth to it that was most decidedly not, the shadow seeming both darker and deeper than it had any business being. And, deep within that darkness, something almost shimmery was stirring.</p><p>“Uh, my lord Beelzebub!” Crowley stammered as he inched closer, letting the edge of the shadow drape across his shoes. “Your hideousness. I wasn’t expecting you.”</p><p>“Iz ziz a bad time, Crowley?” Beelzebub’s voice asked, sounding almost suspicious.</p><p>“No, no, not at all,” Crowley hastened to say. He took a quick breath and forced his racing heart to slow. “It’s business as usual here. What can I help you with?”</p><p>“You are favoured, Crowley,” intoned Beelzebub in a voice that made Crowley think that ‘favoured’ was the very last thing he wanted to be. “Hell haz a zpecial project for you. To mark ze year of our Lord.”</p><p>Beelzebub didn’t have to explain herself: Crowley had been wondering all year if Hell had something particularly nasty afoot for humanity. 666 was the number of the Beast, after all, making 1666 a seldom-seen anniversary. There had been no announcement at the beginning of the year, though, and no change in Crowley’s orders, so, as the year had drawn towards its close, he had been hopeful that Hell—like many a middle-aged spouse—had simply forgotten.</p><p>It seemed now that that was not the case.</p><p>“Great!” Crowley said with as much false enthusiasm as he could muster. “Looking forward to it.”</p><p>“We are zending up zome demonz to aid with ze mizzion,” Beelzebub informed him. “You will be zeir local guide.”</p><p>“Will do,” Crowley said, doing his best to ignore his stomach as it began to churn uncomfortably. “Er, can I ask what the mission is?”</p><p>There was no response for a moment, the darkness ebbing in intricate, kaleidoscopic patterns. “You will find out ze detailz zoon enough. But we are building on one of your ideaz. You zhould be mozt proud.”</p><p>Crowley felt a chill creep over him, a very different type from what had beset him earlier. “Er, which idea would that be?”</p><p>But already the sizzling darkness was receding, collapsing into itself like an origami lotus being folded into ever-smaller triangles. “Do not mezz ziz up for uz, Crowley…”</p><p>The darkness reduced itself to a speck and winked out of existence, leaving Crowley staring at the shadowed but otherwise completely ordinary wall of the charnel house, his heart hammering in his chest and his stomach tying itself into knots. If this project, whatever it was, turned out to be of a calibre worthy of the year 1666, then this could be very bad indeed. And if it was, then that meant that <em>Aziraphale</em>—</p><p>Crowley broke his thought off and turned forcibly away from the charnel house, drawing several quick, shallow breaths in an attempt to steady himself. He didn’t know what the scale of the project was—didn’t know much of anything yet. Just that, apparently, it had its basis in something Crowley had thought of.</p><p>He strode away from the cathedral, rapidly rifling through a mental list of every report he’d submitted to Hell in the last three centuries, trying to pinpoint any details about what Hell had in store. Nothing stood out to him in particular, though none of the potential options boded very well either.</p><p>He kept on walking, head down, eyes on the ground in front of him, as though the grass of the churchyard might yield some useful secret.</p><p>Did it have something to do with the restoration of the monarchy? That had been part of his recent report.</p><p>Crowley reached the road and turned mindlessly down Paternoster Row, heading west. To either side, wood-framed buildings clustered close, jetties pushing their higher stories out over the road. This was the stationers’ street, and it smelled strongly of ink and paper. Humanity bustled around him, many people heading to or from St Paul’s, filling the air with a familiar relaxed chatter. While Crowley loved to eavesdrop as a general rule, this time he tuned it all out, too absorbed with his current predicament.</p><p>Maybe Hell was still reading through his older reports. Heck, given their sense of administrative efficiency they could be going off of something he’d written five hundred years ago! Something that wasn’t even relevant anymore, but Hell still thought it was. If that was the case, he didn’t know if the outdatedness of the information would be a blessing or a curse.</p><p>There was a slightly louder voice trying to make itself heard over the usual din of the street, but Crowley didn’t pay it any mind, continuing to trudge forward. Maybe something about the recent plague?</p><p>He was still turning over increasingly alarming possibilities in his head when a hand closed around his upper arm and brought him suddenly but not roughly to a halt.</p><p>“Wha—?” Crowley began, jumping a little and automatically trying to pull away, his mind still occupied with thoughts of Beelzebub. Then he turned and almost jumped again as he saw Aziraphale smiling at him from just a foot away. The angel looked slightly ridiculous as always in his frills, embroidered doublet, and hip-length cream cloak, the fashion easily gone by the wayside half a century ago, and he had several books piled into his other arm.</p><p>“Crowley!” Aziraphale greeted, sounding delighted as he released Crowley’s arm and gave it a light pat. “I saw you walking past through the window—I just found this marvellous book by a fellow named Robert Hooke!” He grappled for a moment with the books in his arms, finally pulling one clumsily from the stack and gesturing with it towards Crowley. “It’s called <em>Micrographia</em> and, I must say, it has some incredible engravings. Just look—”</p><p>Crowley couldn’t even bring himself to glance at the book Aziraphale was holding out to him, too absorbed with the sight of the angel. Aziraphale’s face was graced with a wide, carefree smile, and Crowley wondered with sudden dread how long it would be before he saw that expression again. Before Aziraphale <em>let</em> him see it again.</p><p>“You really ought to see the one of the flea…I say, my dear, are you all right?”</p><p>Crowley forced his gaze away, feeling suddenly quite ill. “No. Uh, I mean, yeah.”</p><p>Even without looking at him, Crowley could tell by the way that <em>Micrographia </em>retracted slightly that Aziraphale didn’t believe that for a second.</p><p>“What’s the matter?”</p><p>“Nothing,” Crowley lied immediately. “I don’t know,” he added a heartbeat later, this one at least partially truthful.</p><p>In the same instant, a sudden darkness fell over the street, causing Crowley to jump yet again and cast his gaze around hastily for the threat. A heartbeat passed before he realised the culprit was just a cloud that had drifted across the sun, blocking what little light was usually able to filter between the crowded buildings.</p><p>Crowley wondered suddenly if Beelzebub might still be keeping an eye on him. And she’d said she was sending demons up, hadn’t she? Crowley should have asked when to expect them. They could arrive at any moment. They could be on their way already.</p><p>“My dear—” Aziraphale began, reaching out for Crowley’s arm.</p><p>“I need to go,” Crowley said abruptly, cutting Aziraphale off and stepping quickly away. Unfortunately, this action looked like he was recoiling from Aziraphale’s outstretched hand, causing the angel to quickly yank it back, a hurt expression stealing across his face. Crowley felt a pang of regret but only took another hasty step backwards, looking over his shoulder and wondering if he was imagining the hair on the backs of his arms prickling.</p><p>He glanced back at Aziraphale, soaking in the sight of the angel with what few moments he had left. “You should go home,” he said. He was another two steps away before he stopped, turning back to Aziraphale yet again even as he hesitated. “I—I’m sorry.”</p><p>It was clear from Aziraphale’s face—currently exhibiting a muddled mixture of concern, surprise, and hurt—that he didn’t understand what Crowley meant, that he was apologizing for more than just his abrupt departure from their conversation.</p><p>But Crowley didn’t have time to explain, and he knew that Aziraphale wouldn’t forgive him anyway. He never had before.</p><p>Crowley turned back to the road and started down it, moving steadily away from where Aziraphale stood, clutching the pile of books and looking after him with a worried expression.</p><p>Crowley wondered suddenly if he was overreacting. Maybe what Hell had in store really wouldn’t be all that bad. Maybe everything would be fine.</p><p>Somehow, Crowley didn’t think so.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Paternoster Row</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>About two a clock this morning a sudden and lamentable Fire broke out in this City, beginning not far from <em>Thames Street</em>, near <em>London</em>-Bridge, which continues still with great violence, and hath already burnt down to the ground many houses thereabouts.</p>
</blockquote><p>–<em>The London Gazette</em>, number 84, September 3rd, 1666</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>September 4 (three days later)</em>
</p><p>As it turned out, Robert Hooke’s <em>Micrographia</em> was a fascinating read. So fascinating, in fact, that it completely absorbed Aziraphale’s attention within minutes of him settling down in one of the ornate, straight-backed chairs in his bookshop to read it.</p><p>By the time he had finished the lengthy tome, including detailed observations of the many foldout pages and intricate engravings of the microscopic world contained therein, he was vaguely aware that he had had to light the nearby candles several times.</p><p>Judging from the muted light visible now through the narrow, leaded-glass windows at the front of the shop, it must be near dawn or dusk. The bookshop itself was a relatively new acquisition for Aziraphale, who had finally outgrown his lodgings in Cornhill, one of London’s wards, about a decade earlier. As it was, living there had been an uphill battle ever since the fifteenth century, when the popularization of the printing press had dashed any hope Aziraphale might have entertained of keeping his collection within an ordinary-sized house.</p><p>When Aziraphale had expressed his distress over the problem to Crowley, the demon had unexpectedly taken the task to heart, returning weekly with options for alternative lodgings. After much dithering by Aziraphale, who had still been very much attached to his Cornhill residence even though he acknowledged it no longer met his needs, he had finally settled on a plot in Soho where he could have his new home custom-built to his specifications. Aziraphale had balked at the expense involved, but Crowley had assured him that Soho was an up-and-coming area that would be one of the richest, nicest parts of town in just a few decades. In Aziraphale’s opinion, it had looked mostly like a half-developed field far removed from all the comforts of life afforded by the City of London proper, but he did have to admit that Crowley had a much better grasp of this sort of thing than he did. Indeed, in the few years he’d been here, he’d seen a great deal of development in the surrounding area, which was quickly shaping up to be exactly the sort of neighbourhood Crowley had described.</p><p>Now, Aziraphale stood, stretched a little, and strode to the rows of free-standing bookcases filling the front half of the room, most of which were already filled to capacity. He walked down the appropriate aisle and carefully shifted some books aside to make room for <em>Micrographia</em>, which he gently nestled into place. He took a moment to smile at the books before striding back down the aisle.</p><p>As he did so, he spotted a few pieces of post lying just inside the door, where they had been pushed underneath it, and he bent to scoop them up. He then proceeded to retreat back to his armchair, which was tucked away towards the rear of the shop, close enough that he could keep an eye on the door and anyone foolish enough to enter, but not so close that passersby were a constant distraction.</p><p>Aziraphale settled himself comfortably into his chair, crossed his slippered feet at the ankle, and flipped through his post.</p><p>The only thing of immediate interest was his copy of <em>The London Gazette</em>, a weekly, subscription-based newspaper that had only started up the year previously. So far, Aziraphale was finding it a wonderful way to keep up with the city’s news without ever having to step foot outside. Outside, as far as Aziraphale was concerned, was very easily overrated.</p><p>Aziraphale took his time reading through the single-page gazette, the week’s news much the usual: English, French, and Dutch fleet movements; the arrival and departure of various European ambassadors; and an outbreak of plague in the Low Countries.</p><p>Aziraphale was beginning to think longingly of fetching himself a cup of tea when he reached the very last paragraph on the back page, an update from the previous Sunday that a small fire had broken out around two in the morning somewhere near Thames Street, by London Bridge.</p><p>Satisfied he hadn’t missed much while reading, Aziraphale set aside the <em>Gazette</em>, rose, and decided that his next item of business was most definitely getting a cup of tea. He was considering making one himself when his mind suggested the possibility of having some pleasant company at the same time. And Crowley had seemed rather…out of sorts the last time Aziraphale had seen him, hadn’t he? Perhaps a spot of tea would do him some good too.</p><p>Aziraphale crossed to the line of hooks near the door and pulled free his cloak, a worsted cream garment edged with gold thread. As he pulled it on, he glanced towards the windows, again noting the muted darkness of the street. Maybe not ideal tea time, then, but surely some place would be open. And Crowley rarely seemed to mind the details of any of Aziraphale’s visits.</p><p>Aziraphale turned his mind from the matter, switching from his slippers to a pair of elegant, low-heeled shoes and pulling on a pair of calfskin gloves. Suitably attired, he turned back to the door and opened it.</p><p>He had taken only two steps before he lurched to a halt, feeling as though he’d walked straight into a brick wall.</p><p>The first thing he registered was that it wasn’t, in fact, dawn <em>or</em> dusk. On the contrary, it appeared to be near high noon, if the patch of reddish light trapped behind the enormous dark cloud blotting out the sky was anything to go by.</p><p>Aziraphale blinked in shock, his gaze dropping and riveting itself on the eastern horizon.</p><p>That whole half of the sky was awash with smoke, creating a huge dark screen that seemed for a moment to be some sort of massive optical illusion. But what couldn’t be mistaken was the heat of the air, hotter and drier than it had been all summer. A strong wind was blowing towards him down the road, driving the smoke closer and sending flurries of ash spiralling through the air like the first flakes of some hellish snowstorm.</p><p>Aziraphale wasn’t the only one staring at the ghastly spectacle; the road was full of passersby and property owners watching the eastern horizon, some muttering in low voices to one another. A few people, mostly women and children, were coming down the road from the direction of the smoke, some coughing but all clutching bundles or boxes to their chests, looking wretched.</p><p>As Aziraphale’s stunned gaze moved back to the smoke, his mind jumped abruptly back to the edition of the <em>Gazette</em> he had read just minutes before. It had mentioned a fire right there at the end, but that had been…what? From two days ago? What must have seemed then like a footnote hardly bearing reporting on, now seemed like the only thing worthy of journalistic attention.</p><p>Aziraphale blinked at the smoke as he recalled another detail from the newspaper: the fire had started near Thames Street, by London Bridge. That meant it was near the southeastern edge of the City of London proper. Despite the huge pall of smoke streaming overhead, that was still nearly two miles distant. That would explain the lack of chaos here, at least.</p><p><em>For now</em>, Aziraphale thought, beginning to panic slightly. Ought he start packing up his books, just in case? Many were truly rare, one-of-a-kind and utterly irreplaceable. He couldn’t bear to lose them.</p><p>Then, unexpectedly, Aziraphale’s mind jumped to Crowley. The demon’s latest residence was in Aldersgate, well within the city walls. Was he safe? Did he know what was going on? Aziraphale knew the demon was partial to long naps, sometimes lasting as long as a week. If he had fallen asleep before all this had started, might he still be sleeping now, as oblivious to the impending disaster as Aziraphale had been, immersed in <em>Micrographia</em>…?</p><p>Properly worried now, Aziraphale started east, all thoughts of his books forgotten.</p><p>Reaching the City was easy enough, though the traffic began to pick up as he neared Ludgate. The City of London proper still bore its medieval wall and, though it now had plenty of gates by which one could enter or leave the city at will, this one at least was currently causing a serious bottleneck.</p><p>People were streaming through the gate as quickly as they could, bearing cloth bundles and entire beds on their backs, clutching books and crates and cooking utensils to their chests, and herding children and small animals in front of them. Horses, carts, and carriages clacked by as quickly as the crowd would allow them, their drivers shouting in a vain attempt to clear the path. The raised voices of several guards competed with them for dominance, attempting to keep order.</p><p>Aziraphale followed closely on the heels of one of the few people trying to enter the city, doing his best to avoid stepping into anyone’s path. As it was, he was nearly knocked to the ground by a cart carrying, among other things, what appeared to be a virginal with ivory inlays.</p><p>Once inside the city walls, Aziraphale veered north towards St Paul’s and Paternoster Row in an attempt to avoid the stream of people heading to the gate.</p><p>The street he’d been happily making purchases on just three days ago was complete pandemonium now. Printers, stationers, and booksellers were running back and forth down the street and shouting directions to a small army of carts and carriages piled high with books and papers.</p><p>Only a few paces away, Aziraphale spotted Mr John Martyn, the proprietor of the Bell bookshop and a personal acquaintance. He was giving hasty instructions to the driver of a cart, who headed off with a load of books as Aziraphale moved closer.</p><p>“What’s going on? Is everything all right?”</p><p>“Mr Fell!” Mr Martyn greeted as he turned and saw him. He sounded a bit tense and stressed, but his face had a sort of forced calm. “I wouldn’t say everything’s all right, no. That fire’s coming straight this way.”</p><p>As though to punctuate his words, the wind chose that moment to pick up, sending a blast of hot, desert-dry air down the street towards them, ruffling the pages of the unbound books and papers.</p><p>“Careful with those, boy!” Mr Martyn shouted at an apprentice running past him, a box of copper embossing tools clutched to his chest.</p><p>“You’re evacuating?”</p><p>“What’s it look like? Our stock and trade’s in paper. Getting it behind stone’s our only hope.”</p><p>“Stone?” Aziraphale echoed.</p><p>“The cathedral!” the bookseller said, motioning another carriage over impatiently. “St Faith’s. Has to be the safest place in the City right about now, God willing. We have some extra stone, are going to shore up the doors when we’re done and seal off the whole crypt.”</p><p>Aziraphale blinked and looked in the direction of St Paul’s. The cathedral was only fifty metres distant, separated by just the other side of Paternoster Row and the width of the churchyard. The square tower was clearly visible over the row of bookshops, standing out starkly against the darkening sky.</p><p>St Faith’s, he knew, was the local parish, though the church itself had been long since incorporated into St Paul’s. It was currently little more than a chapel occupying one-half of the crypt beneath the enormous cathedral. St Faith was the patron saint of booksellers, and her church the property of the stationers’ guild, giving the proprietors of Paternoster Row unique access to the stone vault. And they had good reason to think that location a safe one: the cathedral was largely isolated from other buildings by the green surrounding it, and the thick stone walls would protect from fire better than anything else could. And if they did brick the entrances shut, that would remove the only other possible entry points for the fire.</p><p>Aziraphale turned back to Mr Martyn, but the bookseller was already busy directing a stream of apprentices to deposit armloads of freshly printed books into the back of a hackney carriage.</p><p>“Well, I wish you the best of luck,” Aziraphale told him and glanced nervously eastward, where the smoke was growing darker still. “I must be off, but take care!”</p><p>The bookseller nodded quickly. “You as well, Mr Fell.”</p><p>From St Paul’s, it was only a five-minute walk to Aldersgate Within, where Crowley lived. The smoke was heavier here, and so was the panic; not everyone was evacuating yet, but clearly a lot of people were thinking about it or readying themselves for the eventuality. The City was home to nearly a hundred parish churches, and it seemed that the bells of every one were ringing an endless warning, creating an ominous soundscape layered over by the shouts and cries of the populace, the clatter of wheels, and a faint, distant roar.</p><p>Crowley rented a room in one of the upper stories of a tall, handsome house, the half-timbering giving it an elegant black-and-white facade. The ground floor was a goldsmith’s shop, and the man himself and several apprentices were visible inside, busily packing up their supplies and inventory.</p><p>Aziraphale was about to walk inside when a woman brushed hastily past him, heading for the shop. From his previous times here visiting Crowley, Aziraphale recognised her as the goldsmith’s wife.</p><p>“One moment, madam,” he said, stepping after her.</p><p>She hesitated and turned back. “Ah, Mr Fell! I’m afraid I’m quite busy—”</p><p>“I’m just looking for, ah, Mr Crowley,” Aziraphale said quickly. “Is he here?”</p><p>She shook her head. “Haven’t seen him in a while, actually. He’s probably left the City for his own safety.”</p><p>Aziraphale nodded, disappointed but not surprised. “Thank you,” he offered, and the goldsmith’s wife nodded and hastened into her husband’s shop.</p><p>Aziraphale turned back to the road, fretting and wondering what he ought to do next. Crowley had lots of favourite haunts, but it would take Aziraphale some time to reach them all, and if Crowley wasn’t at home then there was a good chance he was either hunkered down safe somewhere else or doing what he could to stop the spread of the fire. Demon or no, Aziraphale knew that Crowley loved the city and would stop any major harm from coming to it if he could. If nothing else, it was in his own self-interest to stop the fire before it reached his lodgings and consumed what few possessions he had.</p><p>Besides, Aziraphale reminded himself sternly, as an angel himself <em>he </em>really ought to be fighting the fire. It was the least he could do, and this looked to be a significant enough blaze that Heaven might even think it suspicious if he stood by and failed to even attempt to protect the innocent citizenry.</p><p>Mind made up, Aziraphale nervously straightened his cream cloak and headed further into the city, walking straight into the hot, dry wind.</p>
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<a name="section0003"><h2>3. As Sodom, as Gomorrah</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle! Such as haply the whole world had not seen the like since the foundation of it, nor to be outdone, ’til the universal conflagration.</p>
</blockquote><p>–John Evelyn, from his diary, September 3rd, 1666</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The chaos in the streets only increased as Aziraphale moved east. The smoke overhead grew thicker and a haze began to form at street level, giving the air a sharp, unpleasant taste and making Aziraphale’s lungs sting.</p><p>It felt a little like walking willingly into the mouth of Hell itself. He could feel the intense heat from several hundred feet away, the smoke blocking out increasingly more of the sky and the air growing hot and parched, sending swirls of thick ash dancing down from the heavens. What little sunlight penetrated the dark clouds filtered through as a deep, bloody red, drenching everything an unholy shade of ruby and making an already dire scene even more frightening.</p><p>Aziraphale had seen great fires before. He had been fortunate enough to only watch Sodom and Gomorrah burning from afar, but had been right in the middle of Alexandria. When Rome had burned, he’d arrived just in time to see the House of the Vestals fall.</p><p>But those were once-in-a-millennium conflagrations, and as such it was the small, everyday fires that Aziraphale had more experience with. London had dozens of them every year, and they were hastily dealt with by an experienced populace. The city was well-prepared. Every livery hall and church had a store of leather buckets, ladders, and fire hooks, and the night watch was on constant lookout for just such an emergency. Several of the more prominent buildings in the city even had those new water-pumping engines!</p><p>All those precautions looked almost foolish now, so insufficient were they to stem even one small part of the inferno raging in front of Aziraphale now.</p><p>It had fully engulfed the end of Cateaton Street, and as Aziraphale slowed to a stunned halt, he got his first good look at the fire itself.</p><p>He’d come to expect the light and the heat, but it was the <em>smell</em> of the fire that he was utterly unprepared for. A thick and heavy woodsmoke, yes, but also the pungent odours of a thousand household goods going up in smoke. The acrid tang of burning tar, the sickly-sweet smell of burning varnishes and preserves, and even the occasional whiff of aromatic spices, like someone was cooking dinner.</p><p>Men and women dashed past Aziraphale down the road, dumping the collections of goods in their arms right there on the street and then dashing back to their houses, seeking to save as much as possible. Many property owners had joined the ranks of those fighting the fire, their fine clothes discarded and sleeves rolled up, forming a fragmented bucket brigade to the nearest well and working at tearing down those houses and shops closest to the fire with long poles terminating in fire hooks.</p><p>Someone near the inferno shouted and pointed as the fire leapt from the roof of one building to the next, spreading eagerly across the plastered thatch.</p><p>“It’s no use!” a thin man in torn breeches and a baggy coat shouted, staggering away from the blaze. “There’s no time. We should be tearing down everything on St Lawrence, while we still can!”</p><p>“And abandon my house?” protested a portly man with a beard almost entirely whitened with ash. “You blackguard!”</p><p>“You would rather both your house <em>and</em> the entirety of St Lawrence burned?” the first man shouted back.</p><p>Just then, one of the houses half-engulfed in flames collapsed in spectacular fashion, cracking and crumbling under the heat. The sound was unlike anything Aziraphale had ever heard before, the wood screaming even as the building collapsed in on itself with a sound like a hundred men banging their swords on their shields.</p><p>A woman with a child in one arm and a chicken in the other rushed past Aziraphale, startling him into action. He hastened towards the flames but almost immediately slowed as the heat rolled over him. It felt like he had stepped into a furnace, and he instantly broke into a heavy sweat, the moisture evaporating the moment it reached his skin.</p><p>“How can I—I’d like to help,” Aziraphale announced as he stumbled to a halt beside the two men who’d been arguing.</p><p>The thin man with the torn breeches glanced over and tossed him the long pole in his hands; Aziraphale caught it clumsily. “Tear down the houses over there at St Lawrence Lane.”</p><p>The other man looked like he wanted to argue, but even he must have been able to see the futility of continuing to work so near to the blaze. “I’ll help,” he growled, and started off down the road, his own pole still in his hand. Aziraphale followed, glad to be retreating from the suffocating heat of the blaze.</p><p>Aziraphale had never been particularly skilled at any sort of manual labour, and pulling down the houses proved to be the worst sort. The timber frames of the buildings were already dried and somewhat brittle from the hot air, but their nails and pegs refused easy parting. The technique seemed to be entirely just thrusting the curved metal fire hook at the end of the pole through any available windows or crevices and dragging backwards, ideally pulling the wooden frame and lath or plaster wall back with it. In reality, this meant a lot of gasping and grunting as the buildings refused to break apart easily, and a good deal of stabbing at the walls when the windows were not well-positioned.</p><p>It was hard, brutal work, and Aziraphale was sweating worse than ever in just minutes, his layers of satin and velvet trapping the heat against his body. Though he was afraid of using miracles so large his supernatural interference might be noticed, he quickly found that using a number of small miracles to weaken the frames of the buildings helped greatly in pulling them down, and he was soon working at nearly twice the pace of his partner.</p><p>They had knocked down the better part of four houses by the time the fire reached them, its tall flames leaping eagerly into the air as the wind blustered relentlessly westward. But the firebreak worked, the gap between the rooflines too large for even the hungry flames to cross.</p><p>A cheer went up from the assembled, and Aziraphale felt a surge of relief mixed with pride. Perhaps the fire could be stopped after all.</p><p>Their relief lasted only a minute. That was when the upper story of the last house on the row collapsed, the roof falling nearly a metre as the building began to list alarmingly towards the firebreak. But the greater concern was the enormous barrage of blazing embers that fountained up into the air where the roof had been. A heartbeat later, a particularly strong gust of wind surged westward, catching the embers and carrying them straight across the firebreak, where they tumbled across the wooden roof of the building opposite.</p><p>“Fie!” swore the portly man who’d been working alongside Aziraphale, and he dashed off down the street.</p><p>Aziraphale stared up at the roof, the wooden shingles already beginning to smoulder. He touched the flames with a brush of power, and the fire winked out.</p><p>“Here! Over here, man!” someone shouted from behind Aziraphale, and he turned to see, some ways down the road, a richly dressed man waving a fist at a man with a horse and cart. It looked like the driver was currently in the process of being hired by a woman dressed all in black, likely a widow. She was busily digging coins out of her purse. “<em>Here</em>, man!”</p><p>The driver twisted in his seat as the richly dressed man stomped over, looking infuriated. “Oi, what?”</p><p>“I was the one who sent for a cart! And it took you bloody well long enough to get here!”</p><p>“I haven’t heard nothing about anybody sending for a cart, mister,” the driver said, sounding a bit cross. “This lady here’s hiring me.”</p><p>“Don’t take that tart’s money! I’ll pay you twice what she’s offering!”</p><p>“She got here first, mister.”</p><p>“Triple! Better yet, four times her price! Do you see the fire? Don’t you know who I am? I don’t have time to squabble over pennies with you.”</p><p>“Please, sir,” the widow urged, reaching out a hand. “I haven’t anyone to help me carry my things, and they’re all I have.”</p><p>The driver hesitated and then looked at the richly dressed man. “Four times as much is sixty pounds.”</p><p>“Good God! Your normal price is four shillings! But I’ll do it. Here!” He started digging his own money from his ample purse.</p><p>“Sir, I beg you—” the widow began even as the richly dressed man pushed a bag of coins towards the driver.</p><p>The driver took it, glanced through it, and looked back at the widow. “I’m truly sorry, madam, but I have a family of my own to think about. My house is likely gone up in flames by now too.”</p><p>“Bring the cart over here,” the richly dressed man said, sounding clearly very satisfied with how the interaction had concluded.</p><p>Disgusted, Aziraphale looked away just in time to see that flames had already overtaken the roof he had just saved, brought on by more sparks and the intense heat that seemed to encourage anything remotely flammable to spontaneously combust.</p><p>The body of the fire was growing closer, jumping along debris left on the road surface, and Aziraphale reluctantly retreated, falling back to the next intersection and sacrificing the remainder of the houses on this road as he did so. He rejoined the fire-fighting team there, already busy tearing down houses on either side of the road.</p><p>And so it went for the next few hours: Aziraphale losing himself in the gruelling physical work of fighting the fire, alternating between tearing down houses by force and manning the increasingly ineffective bucket brigade. He began using his powers with less discretion, turning back a wall of flame here and vanishing a heap of flaming rubble there. Perhaps it helped slow the fire; it was hard to tell. The inferno certainly kept coming.</p><p>The city’s bells continued pealing their occasional warning cries in the distance, and the men working alongside Aziraphale changed out as the spent retreated and the proprietors of the buildings now in immediate peril appeared to defend their property. Others didn’t bother fighting at all, only dashing from their houses and shops with belongings clutched in their arms, hailing down the occasional passing cart or horse or simply running as quickly as their legs could carry them through the clogged, chaotic streets. He thought the sun might have set but it was hard to tell, the fire shedding its own sickly light and the sky completely obscured by dark smoke.</p><p>Aziraphale had just handed his pole to a newcomer and stepped back, intending on rejoining the bucket brigade for a time, when there came a scream to his left. He spun to see the upper portion of a house with a burning roof collapsing forward, showering the street with flaming shingles. The scream had come from a young woman on her knees amidst the falling, fiery debris, her arms raised above her head in a vain attempt to shield herself.</p><p>Several people rushed forward at once, but Aziraphale was closer, moving forward and steadying the collapsing structure with a discrete wave of his hand. With the same motion, he pulled off his sweat-stained, rumpled cloak and threw it around the woman’s shoulders, using it to frantically pat out the flames that had caught onto her clothing.</p><p>The two of them stumbled back towards the centre of the road, away from the unstable roof, the woman grabbing frantically at Aziraphale’s cloak as they went. She succeeded in wresting it from his hands and yanked it over her head, frantically extinguishing the beginnings of a fire that had caught in her hair. As she did so, Aziraphale’s hands slipped free and one of them happened to brush against a portion of his cloak that had caught fire, causing him to yank his hand back in pain.</p><p>“Good heavens!” he swore automatically, shaking his hand even as he felt the fire extinguish.</p><p>“S—sorry,” stammered the woman, finally finishing patting herself down with Aziraphale’s ruined cloak.</p><p>“It’s all right,” Aziraphale said, still wringing his hand. Though he’d been fighting the fire for hours now, he’d managed to avoid actually being burned, apart from a few flying embers peppering his exposed skin. It hurt a fair bit more than he’d imagined it would. “What are you doing this close to the fire anyway? You should go west; get out of the city.”</p><p>“Yes—yes, I know. I thought I had more time—came back for—well, it doesn’t matter.” She looked properly chagrined. “Thank you, sir,” she offered. “I—I’ll go.” She handed Aziraphale his ruined cloak back. It was still gently burning in a few places.</p><p>Aziraphale nodded numbly as she left, hurrying down the darkened road and hugging herself. Then he returned his gaze to his burned hand, bemused. It wasn’t that it hurt a lot, exactly, more that it…hurt in a different sort of way.</p><p>Then a bolt of suspicion raced through Aziraphale, and he hastily turned his ruined cloak over in his hands, searching for one of the still-smouldering sections. He found one and blew on it a few times to encourage a true flame to break out, and then he raised his other hand towards it, not quite touching but close enough to feel the flame licking dangerously close to his skin.</p><p>He caught a much clearer impression of it then: the faintest sense of demonic influence. This wasn’t hellfire, nor anything even remotely close to it in terms of potency, but it definitely had that air about it, as though some demon, somewhere, had poured a moderate amount of demonic magic into it, encouraging it to burn hotter and spread faster.</p><p>Aziraphale’s mind immediately leapt to Crowley, but he discarded the idea as soon as it presented itself. The idea of Crowley purposefully burning down his own city was ridiculous, and, besides, this particular touch of demonic magic didn’t feel much like Crowley’s. Admittedly, it was hard to tell much of anything given how faint the trace was, but Aziraphale thought he would have recognised Crowley’s magic at work after all these years, even in such small quantities.</p><p>And if Crowley was indeed not responsible for this…</p><p>Aziraphale lowered the cloak, folding the fabric over to extinguish the burgeoning flame.</p><p>There must be some other demon in the city. Or demons, even. Either way, the forces of Hell were almost certainly afoot.</p><p>Aziraphale started walking away from the inferno, his mind churning and the mundane process of slowing the spread of the fire dwindling in importance in his mind. He and Crowley were Above and Below’s official representatives to this part of the world, tasked with swaying humanity to their side but instructed not to undertake large projects without prior approval. Crowley would never have suggested such a project to Hell, which meant that Hell was acting of its own initiative. Furthermore, the scale of the destruction thus far meant that Hell was doing something it knew Heaven wouldn’t like, stepping wilfully over the carefully drawn line that prevented a second war from breaking out between Heaven and Hell before the appointed time.</p><p>In other words, Hell had broken the rules and that meant Heaven could be called on to reciprocate in kind, to keep the sides balanced. Aziraphale could call in <em>reinforcements</em>.</p><p>The idea was so reassuring that Aziraphale hastened his pace, forcing his cramped, exhausted legs towards the closest parish church. It wasn’t hard to find: he just looked for the nearest steeple.</p><p> </p><p>🔥🔥🔥</p><p> </p><p>“Wow, great job, everyone! It’s getting late, so let’s call it a day, huh? What do you say?” Crowley looked hopefully between the four demons standing beside him, their faces cast in flickering light as they watched another house burst into flames.</p><p>The largest of the demons, a rather dim brute named Hashmal, turned to look at Crowley, a disappointed look on his chiselled face. “But we’ve barely even started!”</p><p>“Yeah!” pitched in Rashaval in agreement. Despite being the shortest of the assembled, Rashaval had a distinctly maniacal glint in her ruby eyes that made Crowley wonder how she’d once passed as an angel for even a minute. “There’re still parts of the city standing!”</p><p>“The fire will reach the rest just fine,” Crowley remarked as offhandedly as he could, forcing a smile. “Why do more work than you have to?”</p><p>“Aye, he’s got a point there,” agreed the third demon, a stout figure who hadn’t provided a name. Bafflingly, her corporation had a limp that she had evidently decided to keep.</p><p><em>“I</em> think it’s <em>fun</em>,” Rashaval put in. “I want to see it burn. <em>All</em> of it.”</p><p>“And just look at it!” Crowley interjected in the most persuasive, fraternal tone he could muster. He took a step forward and motioned at the line of flaming houses before them, standing out brightly against the darkened, smoke-filled sky. “Look! Magnificent work, I must say. <em>Par excellence</em>. Couldn’t have done it better myself. But, I mean, the city’s been on fire for…what? Three days now? I don’t know about you lot, but Hell isn’t paying me overtime.”</p><p>Hashmal shuffled his feet a little.</p><p>“And it’s not like we haven’t already had loads of fun! Remember how we scared that baker out of his wits? Quality work.” Crowley turned his words and appeal to Rashaval. “And remember the Lord Mayor, coming out to see what the matter was and dismissing it out of hand?”</p><p>“He was a bloody fool!” Rashaval agreed with a dark chuckle and a smile that showed altogether too many teeth.</p><p>“Yes!” Crowley exclaimed, actually agreeing with his own statement for once. “The terrible wrath of our tremendous, wonderfully wicked fire could not have been overestimated.”</p><p>“I did enjoy watching the maid die,” the stout demon agreed pensively. “And the mob beating that Dutchman.” Her grin widened. “We should do <em>that</em> again!”</p><p>Hashmal and Rashaval cheered their approval, and Crowley felt his stomach tie itself into knots.</p><p>“But surely we’ve—”</p><p>“We are not done yet,” interrupted Izkamon, the fourth of the demons Hell had sent up.</p><p>The rest of them fell silent, their eyes moving unanimously to Izkamon. While not formally their leader, he was by far the quietest of the four, and this made Crowley think he might be the most dangerous of them all. The way he wore his rather ordinary-looking corporation said that he valued efficiency of action, but he also had a rather chilling habit of inspecting his nails, as though displeased there wasn’t currently any blood under them.</p><p>“So far, we have only burned houses,” Izkamon said in those carefully clipped tones of his. “Useless, <em>petty</em> human houses.” He spat.</p><p>The other demons rumbled confused but enthusiastic agreement. Crowley tried to work out how a house could be useless or petty.</p><p>“To be fair,” Crowley put forth carefully, “We <em>did</em> burn the Royal Exchange, the Post Office, and—”</p><p><em>“Insufficient,”</em> Izkamon snarled, cutting Crowley off. “To please the Lord Beelzebub, we need to do more. We need a <em>jewel</em>.”</p><p>Again, there was confused but enthusiastic rumbling from the assembled demons, Crowley excepted. He had a very bad feeling about what was about to happen next.</p><p>Izkamon turned his head meaningfully to the north, and the assembled followed suit.</p><p>Crowley looked over the roofs of the smouldering houses and felt his heart constrict in his chest as his gaze fell on the square stone tower of St Paul’s Cathedral.</p><p> </p><p>🔥🔥🔥</p><p> </p><p>One of the front doors of the small parish church was ajar, and as Aziraphale entered he saw that the place had been cleaned out of valuables. Likely it had been by the clergy upon evacuation, but Aziraphale wasn’t willing to rule out opportunistic looters. As he’d been reminded all too clearly in the last few hours, disasters really did bring out both the best and worst of humanity.</p><p>The small, narrow nave of the church was quiet and dark, no lights burning and the sound of the fire raging just down the road deadened somewhat by the stone walls.</p><p>Aziraphale quickly crossed to the front and knelt before the stripped altar. He closed his eyes, put his hands together, and called Heaven. “O Lord, answer thy servant Aziraphale…”</p><p>He had to repeat the invocation a few times before he felt himself connect, and, when he opened his eyes, he saw a faint sparkling in the air in front of him, over the altar.</p><p>“This is Heaven, Sapherion speaking,” a slightly bored voice said. The patch of air brightened slightly in time with her words.</p><p>“Ah, Sapherion,” Aziraphale greeted, grappling slightly with the unfamiliar angel’s name. “It’s Aziraphale, liaison to Earth. I’m presently stationed in London and, well, I could do with a spot of help.”</p><p>“What kind of help?” Sapherion asked tonelessly, disinterest dripping from her words. From somewhere behind Aziraphale, he could distantly hear another building collapsing, the sound of timbers cracking accompanied by shouts of warning.</p><p>“Well,” Aziraphale began, unsure now that he had made contact exactly how he wanted to frame his request. “Well, you see, there’s a great fire sweeping through the city even as we speak, and I believe that it was set by demons.”</p><p>“So?”</p><p>Aziraphale could only blink at the patch of light for a moment. “<em>So,</em>” he repeated, perhaps a bit strongly, “the good, God-fearing people of this city are in grave danger. I know I am to limit the magnitude of my celestial interactions with humanity, but Hell has gone too far here—clearly they are intent on burning this entire Christian city to the ground! They have crossed a line and we—we—” Aziraphale paused for breath. “Well, we ought to cross it right back. Get some angels down here so we can get the fire under control while we still can.”</p><p>“Hm,” Sapherion said, sounding somewhat more interested now. “What was the name of the city again?”</p><p>“London,” Aziraphale supplied quickly, relieved his report was being taken seriously. “In England, in Europe.”</p><p>“Hmm,” Sapherion said again. There was the sound of shuffling papers.</p><p>Behind Aziraphale, there came a flurry of shouts and the sound of running feet, punctuated by the neighing of a horse. A loud voice floated through the nave, something about an order by the king.</p><p>“London, England,” Sapherion’s voice said at last, snapping Aziraphale’s attention back to the sparkling light above the altar. “A fire, correct?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“One moment.”</p><p>Aziraphale felt the connection between them dim, and he realised with some surprise that he had been put on hold.</p><p>He took the opportunity to glance over his shoulder. Through the open door, he could see the dark smoke coiling more thickly, but there weren’t yet any visible flames.</p><p>“Aziraphale,” a new voice said as Aziraphale abruptly felt the connection to Heaven reopen.</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“This is Ephereos, head of Operations.”</p><p>“Nice to meet you,” Aziraphale said quickly. “Like I was telling Sapherion, the fire’s growing really quite quickly, so if you could send—oh, say two dozen angels down as soon as—”</p><p>“You misunderstand,” Ephereos said, speaking right over Aziraphale.</p><p>“…sorry?”</p><p>“Heaven will not interfere in this conflagration.”</p><p>Aziraphale could only stare at the patch of light for a moment, stunned. “What? Why not?”</p><p>“It is part of the Plan,” Ephereos answered.</p><p>Aziraphale had no response, certain he had heard incorrectly.</p><p>“Do not worry about it,” Ephereos continued. “Goodbye.”</p><p>“Wait! No!” Aziraphale forced out, and he was relieved when he felt the connection waver but remain open. “What do you mean, about the Plan? It can’t be part of the Plan! Hell started this fire, don’t you understand?”</p><p>There was a moment’s silence from the other end of the line.</p><p>“Yes,” Ephereos said finally. “It is part of the Plan.”</p><p>The connection went dead.</p><p>Aziraphale stared at the space above the altar as the light flickered and faded away, disbelief etched across every line of his face.</p><p>Then he immediately mentally backtracked. He must not have properly communicated the problem. Heaven could not <em>possibly</em> condone this sort of demonic interference. Surely they didn’t intend to simply hand Earth over to Hell without even a fair fight? Wasn’t that the entire purpose of the Apocalypse, the End of Days itself?</p><p>And this wasn’t the End of Days, no—Aziraphale would have been notified if it were, surely. There would have been internal marketing campaigns. Propaganda. Mustering the troops. That sort of thing. But this…</p><p>This was just turning a blind eye to Hell’s machinations. And not only that, but to the plight of all the souls in the city! For every drop of innocent blood spilled in this fire, Heaven would be just as culpable as Hell.</p><p>And maybe that was fine for Ephereos and Gabriel and all the rest, safely ensconced in their ethereal, celestial offices, but it wasn’t for Aziraphale. He was here, on the ground, <em>living</em> through this disaster. And he was damned if he wasn’t going to do what he could to help.</p><p>Aziraphale made his way to his feet, scowled at the altar, and then turned and strode down the aisle, towards the doors and the inferno that lay beyond.</p><p>If there were demons afoot, then he would find a way to stop them himself. Better yet, he and Crowley could—</p><p>Crowley.</p><p>Aziraphale felt himself lurch to a stop in the darkened nave of the church, his thoughts turning fully to the demon, wondering again where he was and if he was all right. Now that he knew Hell was afoot, the latter question suddenly stood out much more strongly.</p><p>His mind flashed back to the last time he had seen Crowley, when he had spotted him in Paternoster Row. He had thought at the time that his friend had seemed out of sorts, distracted and preoccupied, but Aziraphale realised now that <em>nervous</em> was a better descriptor. Anxious, maybe. Afraid.</p><p><em>Hell must have told him what was going to happen</em>, Aziraphale realised with a jolt. <em>Looped him in for his local knowledge, if nothing else.</em></p><p>Since Aziraphale hadn’t received any sort of message from Crowley, encoded or otherwise, it was very likely he was still with the other demons and unable or unwilling to slip away. So where would they be?</p><p>Aziraphale pushed his legs back into motion, heading out of the church and moving west down the street. Behind him, the fire was only a few buildings away, greedily devouring everything its flaming tendrils touched and resisting any attempts to be slowed or turned back.</p><p><em>The demons would be right at the heart of it, surely?</em> Aziraphale thought to himself as he strode down the street, racking his mind. Absolute destruction of London was likely their goal, but a solid half of the city must already be in flames by now. So where would the fire spread next? Where would a demon bent on the destruction of the city lead it?</p><p>That’s when Aziraphale looked up and saw, shining faintly despite the darkness and the smoke hanging low over the city, the obvious answer to his question. The place any demon worth his sulphur would go when seeking to bring London to its knees: the holiest place in the city.</p><p>Aziraphale set his course for St Paul’s Cathedral.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. St Paul’s Cathedral</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Longer chapter today because there was no good place to break it. :)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>When all the World consum’d with Fire shall be,</p>
  <p>And TIME gave place unto ETERNITY:</p>
  <p>Th’ innumerous Sparks (that fall like feathered Snow)</p>
  <p>Like Heaven rejected STARS do seem to shew</p>
</blockquote><p>–Samuel Wiseman, “Londons Fatal Fire” (excerpt), 1667</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Flames were blazing along the wooden scaffolding clinging to the sides of St Paul’s as Aziraphale ran across the darkened churchyard. Given the relatively wide berth around the cathedral, he was a bit surprised to see that the fire had reached it already, though he supposed that either the strong wind or a douse of direct demonic influence was the culprit.</p><p>He had been forced to circle around the cathedral and approach it from the west, as the entrance at the end of the southern transept was already almost entirely consumed by flames. Most of the roof of the cathedral was similarly ablaze, the fire burning its way through the heavy lead roof to the wooden frame within. Dusk had long since come and gone, and the flames stood out sharply against the dark sky, casting the contours of the cathedral’s intricate stonework into sharp relief.</p><p>Aziraphale dashed around the corner of the church, his shadow flung long behind him as he adjusted his trajectory towards the classical portico that served as the cathedral’s main entrance. He hurried up the short flight of stairs and dodged around the handful of people rushing past him, fleeing the perceived safety of the cathedral as the nearby scaffolding began to snap and sway alarmingly.</p><p>“Out! Everyone out—head west!” That was a young priest standing at the threshold of the doors and waving people past him. Even as Aziraphale watched, he glanced one last time into the darkened interior of the cathedral and then turned back, coughing as a plume of smoke billowed from the door. The priest hastened down the steps, continuing to cough as he fled the burning building.</p><p>Aziraphale hesitated only long enough to be sure the priest wouldn’t see him before dashing forward and slipping through the cathedral’s doors.</p><p>Inside was a terrifying mixture of serenity and calamity. The cathedral’s nave was one of the longest in the world, and from where Aziraphale stood at its very end he could see straight down the entire length of the church to the crossing, where a tall black marble screen marked the beginning of the choir. And, beyond it, through the haze of smoke hanging in the space, he could dimly see the large, circular rose window at the very far end of the cathedral. To either side of him soared the tall compound pillars lining the body of the nave, each one holding aloft the immense Gothic arches that formed the vaulted roof. This was the oldest part of the church, dating back to Norman times, and the stone was worn and crumbling, still strong but showing the marks of time.</p><p>Lately, the nave had been filled by shopkeepers, gossipers, and the like, and the remnants of their habitation remained here still. Tables, carts, crates, and barrels lay every which way, scattered across the checkerboard floor like seeds cast from the hand of a sower. Piles and piles of merchant goods filled the space as well, evidently brought here in the hopes of protecting them from the fire sweeping through the city. It was far too late to save them from their fate, though, because absolutely anything remotely flammable in the cathedral was on fire.</p><p>Flames danced across the tables and overturned carts, engulfing crates of foodstuffs and perfumes, bolts of cloth, and casks of wine. Many of the memorials lining the cathedral’s walls were carved from stone, but those that weren’t were blazing like torches, as were the colourful banners hanging high on the walls, near the clerestory level. The stained glass windows lining the nave were falling to pieces, the lead holding the designs together melting away and sending shards of coloured glass smashing to the tile floor far below. They were accompanied by flurries of glowing embers and flakes of plaster and wood dropping from the ceiling as the fire ate through the beams holding up the roof, the cathedral already beginning to groan with the strain.</p><p>A handful of people were still inside, rushing for the doors Aziraphale had just come through, many coughing or stumbling as they staggered down the nave.</p><p>Aziraphale gathered himself and started forward, hastily scanning the aisles for any sign of Crowley or any other demon.</p><p>He hadn’t made it more than a dozen paces when there was a tremendous <em>crack!</em> and Aziraphale felt the floor beneath his feet quiver. He staggered to keep his footing as the entire building shook, stone dust cascading down the walls as, without warning, the entire southern transept simply collapsed.</p><p>Aziraphale was far enough down the length of the nave that he only saw the edge of the destruction, the vaulted ceiling crumbling and giving way. It plunged several hundred feet before coming to a deafening, screeching halt, blocks of stone crashing into the floor and bouncing away like dropped coins from the hand of some wealthy giant.</p><p>Everyone still in the cathedral started screaming, the last handful of people redoubling their efforts to leave as soon as humanly possible. High up near the ceiling, a pair of pigeons darted about in panic in their search to find an exit, their wings shedding flaming feathers.</p><p>“Back! Get back!” someone yelled as they ran towards the exit and Aziraphale, waving a hat ineffectually in front of their face to clear the screen of smoke.</p><p>Aziraphale hesitated as he felt the floor slowly stop quivering beneath his feet, the walls steadying themselves for now. The half-collapsed southern transept was fully engulfed in flames, but the rest of the cathedral seemed to be temporarily stabilised. He ought to have a few minutes more, at least. Aziraphale ignored the man’s warning cry and resumed his forward motion, striding determinedly further into the flaming, crumbling cathedral.</p><p>To his credit, the man tried to grab Aziraphale as he sprinted past, intending on taking the angel with him, but Aziraphale shook him off with a hasty, “It’s all right.”</p><p>Just as he said it, the ceiling of the southern transept collapsed a bit further, the screaming of the wood and stone the most wretched song that had ever filled the cathedral.</p><p>“God save you!” the man yelped as he turned and ran for his own life towards the doors.</p><p>Hyperaware of the snapping and groaning noises coming from the rest of the roof, Aziraphale broke into a sprint himself, running past overturned crates, carts, and tables towards the crossing. This was the place where the nave, choir, and transepts met, the centre of the cross formed by the cathedral’s four wings. Above it rose the hollow, immensely tall stone tower, which had itself once borne England’s tallest spire.</p><p>Aziraphale was just skidding to a halt beneath the crossing, skirting to the left to avoid the inferno that had once been the southern transept, when he heard the sounds of laughter from ahead of him.</p><p>He immediately backtracked, running for the closest pillar and throwing himself behind its sizeable girth.</p><p>A heartbeat later there came a crack and a bang, accompanied by sniggering and maniacal laughter.</p><p>“Ay, that was fun! Can we do it again?”</p><p>“No, Hashmal, are you thick?” asked a rather annoyed, gravelly female voice. “We can’t exactly trap him down there <em>again</em>, now can we?”</p><p><em>Him?</em> Aziraphale wondered in alarm. <em>Crowley?</em></p><p>There came the sounds of someone skipping over the stone floor, the noise barely audible over the crackling roar of the fire and occasional groan of the cathedral. “Can’t we at least wait around to hear the screaming?” asked a higher-pitched female voice in a slightly whinging tone. “I haven’t heard enough screaming on this trip yet.” This was accompanied by an oddly familiar ripping sound, like the object in question was made of fabric.</p><p>“No.” This voice was a bit colder than the others, and a bit sharper.</p><p>“Oh, why not? We got to watch the pleading.” More ripping.</p><p>“Well, <em>I </em>can’t wait to see that coward in ’Ell,” interrupted the gravelly voice again.</p><p>The voices were moving closer to Aziraphale now, heading for the nave, and he carefully took a step further back around the pillar to stay out of their lines of sight.</p><p>“Yeah, the boss might let me burn him <em>again!”</em></p><p>“We ain’t tellin’ the boss, remember?” the gravelly voice snapped. “Wouldn’t like it.”</p><p>“Oh, yeah.”</p><p>The tearing sound continued, and Aziraphale had a flash of terrible intuition as he realised exactly what it was the demon was ripping to pieces.</p><p>“Let’s go burn some more humans, eh?”</p><p>The voices were just past Aziraphale now, heading down the nave towards the exit. Aziraphale cautiously inched closer around the edge of the pillar, staying in the shadow but wanting to get a look at the speakers.</p><p>He hadn’t gotten very far when there was a flurry of movement near the floor and Aziraphale hastily ducked back behind the pillar, summoning his magic and readying himself for a fight.</p><p>But no demon presented itself; instead, a book landed heavily on the checkerboard stone floor and bounced to a halt only a metre from Aziraphale’s hiding place. It was lying on its back, open, but half of the pages were missing and the binding was badly mangled, one cover half torn off.</p><p>Aziraphale’s eyes riveted on it in horror. Then he resumed inching around the pillar and got his first look at the demons.</p><p>There were four of them, striding unconcernedly down the darkened nave while embers and bits of burning debris rained down on them from the ceiling. One was making a show of cracking their knuckles, and two others were waving their hands to set alight anything that had managed to escape the flames so far. From their silhouettes and gaits, he could tell that Crowley wasn’t among them.</p><p><em>Let’s go burn some more humans, eh?</em> the words of one of the demons drifted back to Aziraphale. They weren’t done yet, weren’t satisfied with the destruction they had wreaked upon the city so far.</p><p>They outnumbered Aziraphale, but given the scale of the destruction visited upon the city they must have been running low on power. Aziraphale had been using his as well, but rather conservatively; he still had about half of his usual reserves left. If not enough to outright defeat the demons, he felt confident he could at least scare them off before they could do any further harm. He could stop them right now. Follow them outside, get the element of surprise…</p><p>There was a lot of the city as yet untouched by the fire, from Ludgate to Fleet Street and further afield, too: Westminster and the intermingling suburbs—Holborn, Temple, and even Soho. His own shop and the priceless books it contained could be next on the demons’ list.</p><p>On the other hand, it sounded like Crowley was in serious trouble. He was trapped somewhere, <em>burning</em> somewhere—but where? The demons had come from the cathedral’s choir, but there weren’t many places there large or secure enough to trap somebody, and even from here he could see that the demons hadn’t bothered to close the door in the choir screen behind them.</p><p>Then his gaze dropped to the tattered book lying on the floor not far from him, where the demon had tossed it. He blinked in surprise when he saw that it wasn’t an ordinary ecclesiastical book, of the sort he would expect to find in a church. On the contrary, one of the torn pages bore a large engraving, and even from this distance he could recognise the detailed, larger-than-life depiction of a fly: it was a page from <em>Micrographia</em>.</p><p>Immediately, Aziraphale’s mind jumped to the booksellers on Paternoster Row and then, a heartbeat later, to St Faith’s, situated in the crypt beneath St Paul’s—beneath the <em>choir</em> of St Paul’s.</p><p>At that moment, there came a sudden piercing creak from high above him, and Aziraphale looked up in alarm as the mass of stonework above the crossing <em>twisted</em>. The fire was raging there even with the relative lack of flammable material, burning through plaster and mortar and digging deep into the wooden frame. For a heartbeat, the movement seemed like an optical illusion, the twisting motion passing down the impossibly tall columns in tremors as the centuries-old stone began to give way under the sheer weight of the tower. A few chunks of stone worked themselves free and dropped to the floor, hitting with such force that the delicate checkerboard pattern shattered, sending tiles flying across the floor.</p><p>Aziraphale’s gaze flashed across the crossing, to the black marble screen and the crypt he knew lay just beyond and beneath it. Behind him, he could hear the demons shouting with glee, nearly to the western entrance.</p><p>Maybe it should have been a difficult decision. Maybe it should have been the most difficult decision Aziraphale had ever made. But it wasn’t, not by a long shot.</p><p>Aziraphale ran for the choir.</p><p>High above him, the stonework creaked and cracked and then, as Aziraphale was still sprinting across the crossing, the tower collapsed.</p><p>Aziraphale threw up an arm to protect himself, ducking his head as he ran and sending an enormous arc of magic flying upwards. It expanded as it went, colliding with the base of the collapsing tower and catching it, keeping the enormous mass of stone in place even as its supports crumbled. A few stones missed the shield and crashed to the cathedral floor, but the rest held, the entire weight of the two-hundred-foot-tall tower bearing down on Aziraphale’s magic.</p><p>The strain was enormous, and Aziraphale gasped for breath as the cost of it hit him. But he didn’t stop running, merely sucking in as deep of breaths as he could manage as he jumped over debris and bolted through one of the doorways in the choir screen.</p><p>He knew that the crypt wasn’t accessible from within the cathedral itself, only from either of two entrances on the exterior of the cathedral, but that wasn’t the direction the demons had come from. And, if Mr Martyn was as good as his word, those entrances would already be sealed off with a great deal of stone for the safety of the books. Which meant that there had to be another way in.</p><p>Worse yet, it also meant that there was no other way out. The cathedral’s choir lacked any exits; the only way out was through the choir screen and then the main doors in the north transept or the nave, both of which were only accessible via the crossing—the same crossing that had the cathedral’s tower hovering over it, held up by little more than Aziraphale’s net of magic.</p><p><em>Better be quick, then,</em> Aziraphale thought, and began hastily looking around for an entrance to the crypt. He found it seconds later: a hole about a metre and a half square in the choir’s tiled floor, surrounded by dust and rubble. A thick plume of dark, oily smoke rose lazily from it.</p><p>The hole appeared to have been created by a memorial statue of a man wrapped in a burial shroud, which had toppled over from its nearby plinth and crashed through the choir floor. The unbroken statue was still there, forming the basis of a haphazard pile of rubble that made an impromptu staircase down into the crypt. Aziraphale wasted no time lowering himself into the hole, feet skidding on the loose rubble.</p><p>Aziraphale had been in the crypt many times before, mostly at the invitation of his bookseller acquaintances, but now it was almost unrecognisable. The air was thick with smoke and dust, and the small windows set high into the walls had been barricaded from the outside, leaving the place looking more like a proper tomb than Aziraphale had ever seen it. The only significant source of light was a fire burning somewhere in the rear of the space, producing more of the thick, choking smoke. He could hear someone coughing wretchedly.</p><p>“Crowley?” Aziraphale shouted and broke off with a cough of his own as he breathed in a lungful of the dark, cloying smoke. He felt his grip on the shield keeping the cathedral’s tower in place weaken in his moment of distraction, and he hastily poured more magic into it, breaking into a sweat at the exertion.</p><p>“Azir—Azirapha—?” a voice shouted back from the darkness, scratched and hoarse, before lapsing into a series of gasping, violent coughs. Despite the roar of the fire, the groaning of the cathedral, and the distorted quality of the voice itself, Aziraphale knew at once that it was Crowley’s.</p><p>Aziraphale started forward and immediately collided with something large and mostly solid at waist-height, forcing him to stagger to a halt. It took a moment of squinting with watering eyes through the smoky darkness before he realised that the object in his path was a large, neatly stacked pile of books. He guessed the entire crypt must be full of them: stacks and stacks of all the books London’s booksellers and stationers had had in inventory.</p><p>“Azira…?” Crowley’s voice cried out again from the darkness, tinged with fear this time.</p><p>“Coming!” Aziraphale shouted back as he started hastily through the smoky darkness, narrowly avoiding several other stacks of books. He wound his way towards the fire burning near the rear of the space, which was also the direction of Crowley’s voice. He threw one arm up over his face and started breathing through his elbow as he ploughed forward, the smoke growing even denser as the heat and light of the fire increased. Somewhere above him, he felt the stonework around the base of the tower crumble even further, the weight pressing down harder on his shield and stealing what little breath he had left.</p><p>He was beginning to get quite light-headed by the time he staggered around one of the crypt’s supporting pillars and finally spotted Crowley through the thick haze of smoke.</p><p>The demon was coughing wretchedly, doubled over in front of an ornately carved wooden screen spanning the width of the crypt. His arms were twisted awkwardly above him and to one side, linen sleeves pushed back and bare wrists bound together by a length of ordinary-looking chain that had been looped through one of the gaps in the screen behind him. The screen wasn’t yet on fire but the pile of books directly in front of Crowley was, and it had collapsed towards the demon, scattering flaming books everywhere. He looked to have kicked those he could reach away from him, giving him a few precious feet of clear stone, but others had landed against the wooden screen and were already beginning to spread the flames to this new victim.</p><p>Crowley twisted his head up as Aziraphale approached, and his next cough caught in his throat as unrestrained relief broke out across his face, his golden, serpentine eyes filling with the emotion. “Oh G—A—<em>Azirapha</em>—” Crowley couldn’t make it all the way through Aziraphale’s name this time either, breaking off in a cough so severe it sounded like he was trying to divest himself of a lung. But he started straining forward nonetheless, pulling at the heavy chain looped tight around his wrists even while he trembled with the exertion of coughing so harshly.</p><p>Aziraphale hurried forward, stepping over the flaming books and into the semicircle of bare stone Crowley had cleared around himself. The smoke was at its thickest here, but Aziraphale barely noticed, the cost of keeping the cathedral’s tower in place affecting him more strongly than the poisoned air.</p><p>Aziraphale squinted at Crowley’s wrists, blinking rapidly to clear stinging flecks of ash from his eyes and sucking in as deep of breaths as he could manage, still breathing through his elbow. Between the heavy smoke and the flickering, insubstantial light of the fire only two paces away, Aziraphale couldn’t make out many details of the chain binding Crowley to the heavy wooden screen, save that it was twisted tightly around his wrists and didn’t give him even an inch of movement.</p><p>Somewhere above them, Aziraphale heard an enormous snap and the sound of stones crashing to the choir floor, the impact sending an alarming amount of stone dust drifting down from the crypt ceiling. The demand on Aziraphale’s powers suddenly increased, and he gasped with the effort, seeing stars. He leaned against the wooden screen for support, the heavy divider not even trembling as it took his weight.</p><p>“Sss—stuck,” Crowley coughed, leaning away from the screen and towards Aziraphale. His head drooped as he said it, and Aziraphale caught sight of a line of something dark running down the side of his face, from the roots of his long hair all the way down to his chin, standing out brightly against his sweat-soaked skin. “Gotta—miracle it—I’m out—”</p><p>Aziraphale looked at his friend in alarm, feeling the weight of the tower bearing down on his magic. Keeping that shield intact required Aziraphale’s full concentration, and it wasn’t possible to perform two miracles at once.</p><p>Crowley kept trying to yank his hands free as he dragged in ragged, panicked breaths, but neither the screen nor chains gave an inch. In front of him, the fire engulfing the pile of books jumped to an adjacent stack, sending even more smoke roiling up towards the low ceiling.</p><p>Aziraphale screwed up his face, braced himself, and dropped the net of magic keeping the tower in place. In the same instant, he darted his hand forward, using just enough magic to break a single link in the chain keeping Crowley in place. He then immediately jerked his hand back upwards, restoring the net of magic far above them even as he heard the sound of stones colliding.</p><p>The cost of renewing the spell was enormous, and Aziraphale lost his breath for several seconds, a burst of pain erupting behind his eyes. He was still struggling with it as Crowley tugged desperately at the chains and finally managed to free himself. He staggered forward as the chains fell away and only narrowly avoided colliding with the flaming pile of books, clutching his wrists to his stomach as he did so and making a wretched noise somewhere between a hiss and a sob.</p><p>Aziraphale forced his wobbly legs forward, his hand finding Crowley’s arm and pulling the demon with him towards the dim light of the exit. Halfway there, Crowley broke into a vicious coughing fit, doubled over in pain and staggering into Aziraphale for support. Aziraphale threw his arm around Crowley’s shoulders and pressed them onwards, beginning to feel quite nauseous himself. Somehow, Crowley managed to keep pace, stumbling along beside Aziraphale even as his body hitched violently, clutching at the angel with a blood- and soot-streaked hand.</p><p>Crowley’s coughing fit had mostly subsided by the time they reached the pile of rubble reaching up towards the hole in the ceiling, though the pounding behind Aziraphale’s eyes was only growing stronger. He paused for breath, propelling Crowley forward in the hopes that he would go first.</p><p>Crowley needed no further encouragement, scrambling up the rubble but pausing halfway to make sure Aziraphale was following. Aziraphale was, though slowly, his breaths tight and short in his chest.</p><p>At the top of the pile of rubble, Crowley reached up and started scrambling through the hole in the ceiling, momentarily blocking even the faint light it afforded. Aziraphale followed after him, feeling a sudden wave of faintness roll over him as the pounding behind his eyes graduated to a full headache.</p><p>He managed to pull his way through the hole in the ceiling, breaking out in shivers as he did so.</p><p>The body of the cathedral looked worse than ever. Entire sections of stonework had collapsed, crushing monuments to saints and martyrs. Most of the choir was in flames now, the tiled floor around them scattered with shards of stained glass and chunks of masonry.</p><p>Crowley was on his hands and knees about a pace away, sucking in deep breaths. The air here was hazier than it had been when Aziraphale had first arrived, but it was leaps and bounds cleaner than that in the crypt, and Crowley’s lungs seemed to be appreciating that.</p><p>Aziraphale pushed himself to his feet, swaying slightly as his vision swam. He could feel his grip on the spell keeping the tower intact slipping, his final reserves of magic nearly exhausted. They had only minutes—maybe less.</p><p>He staggered over to Crowley and started pulling him gracelessly to his feet.</p><p>“Have to go…<em>now</em>,” Aziraphale said breathlessly. From the other side of the black marble choir screen came the sounds of stones crashing to the floor.</p><p>Between Aziraphale’s incessant tugging and Crowley’s trembling legs, Crowley managed to gain his feet, and the two of them started staggering towards the choir screen, leaning equally on each other for support.</p><p>As they passed through the doorway in the screen and stepped into the crossing, Aziraphale tilted his head back, gazing up at the cathedral’s tower.</p><p>The whole mass of stonework was nearly a hundred feet lower than it had been before, the Gothic arches that had once formed the four bases of the tower visibly quivering as they hung above the decimated checkerboard floor at a fraction of their previous height, supported entirely by Aziraphale’s magic. The tall stained glass windows that lined the tower’s walls were now smashed and cracked, and they blazed with flame, the fire shedding an eerie glow that illuminated the tower’s interior.</p><p>The highest reaches of the tower’s walls were still mostly intact, but the bottom two-thirds were frozen in various stages of crumbling, twisting out of shape as the entire structure collapsed. Blocks of masonry had been forced free and thrown into the centre of the tower, and they remained there still, a thousand fragments of stone suspended in the smoky darkness of the tower’s interior, wreathed by rivers of swirling embers.</p><p>But Aziraphale’s flagging power was no longer enough to keep gravity entirely at bay, and the entire colossus was plunging with exquisite slowness towards the floor, crumbling into pieces at a fraction of its proper speed.</p><p>Crowley staggered to a shocked halt, staring upwards as the arm he had around Aziraphale’s shoulders reflexively tightened.</p><p>Aziraphale’s headache ratcheted up a notch in intensity, the edges of his vision beginning to veer to static.</p><p>“North…transept,” he gasped, raising an unsteady hand to point towards the exit. Above them, the tower quavered and abruptly dropped several metres before catching again, a fresh shower of stone fragments breaking free and plunging earthward. They never hit the ground, though, instead slowing to near halts in the air several metres above Aziraphale and Crowley’s heads.</p><p>This seemed to snap Crowley back to the present, and he hastily lurched into motion, starting forward and pulling Aziraphale with him. For his part, Aziraphale just tightened his grip around Crowley’s far shoulder and tried not to lean on the demon too heavily, focusing on keeping his trembling legs moving.</p><p>Aziraphale reached out mentally for the weave of the spell, thinking disjointedly that he could lower the protective net in stages as they moved away from the crossing, but he couldn’t get a good grasp on the individual threads, his focus splintering as he felt his remaining strength drain away. Through the haze ringing his vision, Aziraphale could see the northern transept somewhere in front of them, the door there wreathed in flames.</p><p>Above them, the tower dropped another metre with a short scream. This time, embers and smaller pieces of debris slipped through Aziraphale’s crumbling shield and showered down around them, peppering their heads and shoulders.</p><p>“Almost—there,” Crowley urged in a rasping, broken voice, pushing both of them closer to the exit.</p><p>That was when Aziraphale’s head exploded in agony, feeling as though someone had driven a dagger into his brain. He cried out in pain and felt himself stumble, falling forward as his last vestiges of control over the spell fled him. There was a sound like screaming valkyries from all around them, and Aziraphale knew the full weight of the tower would be crashing down right behind them at any second.</p><p>He felt Crowley grab onto him, and Aziraphale was distantly aware they were moving forward, his own feet clumsy and unresponsive. The floor of the cathedral trembled and then lurched underfoot as there came an enormous crash from behind them. It felt like the world was trying to shake itself to pieces.</p><p>Then, abruptly, the grey, flaming walls of the cathedral were gone and so too was the hard stone floor underfoot, though the ground was still trembling and the air still searing. Aziraphale wanted nothing more than to sink to his knees and never get up, his vision still veering towards black, but Crowley kept pushing him onwards, the demon’s breaths short and hitching but his arm never wavering from around Aziraphale’s shoulders.</p><p>After what must have been nearly a minute, Aziraphale felt his vision begin to clear, his system struggling to reset after the shock of overdrawing his magical reserves in such a spectacular—and spectacularly dangerous—fashion.</p><p>Crowley, Aziraphale saw, was leading them in a staggering, winding path around the darkened exterior of the cathedral, though with occasional pauses as Crowley was beset by dry, racking coughs. The grass all around them was either blackened or smouldering gently, but Aziraphale barely felt the heat. Above them, the sky was a burnt umber, the flames reflecting off the heavy black smoke and providing the only source of light in the darkness. More alarmingly, every street he could see was in flames, their escape cut off on all sides.</p><p>A few minutes later, as they reached the western edge of the green, Aziraphale hazily spotted a narrow gap in the wall of fire ahead. The wind was blowing towards it, pushing the flames on the adjacent buildings closer, but it remained open for now.</p><p>Crowley made for it immediately, still pulling Aziraphale along with him, the two trembling as they weaved across the churchyard like a pair of drunks.</p><p>They reached the gap a few minutes before the flames did, slipping between two buildings and stumbling out into a road. They followed the already-abandoned road due west, towards where the smoke thinned ever so slightly and the darkness lay a bit heavier. They were soon passing through Ludgate, the area that had just hours previously been a bottleneck for refugees. Now, it was nearly deserted.</p><p>The incredible heat slowly slacked off as they staggered further west. They were outside the City proper now, leaving the flames behind and entering the inky darkness of the night. When they staggered onto a street still alive with human chaos, the houses here as yet untouched by fire but their inhabitants appearing all too certain their demise was well on its way, Crowley’s legs collapsed. Aziraphale followed him all too willingly to the ground, sucking in trembling breaths and feeling more ill than he thought he ever had in his entire life.</p><p>Beside him, Crowley was coughing again, one hand bracing itself on the dusty ground as his entire body shook with the effort.</p><p>“Peter!” a voice cried, and Aziraphale dimly registered footsteps rushing towards them. He looked up blearily and saw a middle-aged man drawing near, his figure dimly lit by a lantern swaying back and forth in his hand. “Fetch some water!” The man looked between Aziraphale and Crowley, both exhausted and bedraggled. “Say, are you two all right?”</p><p>Aziraphale could only stare at the man for a moment, eyes watering. From what he could see of his attire, Aziraphale guessed he was a common tradesman of some description, possibly a tailor or draper. Though Aziraphale had never seen him before in his life, it struck him suddenly quite deeply that here, in the midst of the single greatest calamity this poor tradesman had likely ever seen, he had come over to <em>them</em> to offer aid.</p><p>Here was, truly, the best of humanity. What he loved about them; what Crowley did, too, though the demon would certainly never admit it: a potential for selfless grace that completely eclipsed anything Heaven had ever seen.</p><p>It was another second before Aziraphale remembered the tradesman had asked him a question, but he couldn’t bring himself to form a response, torn between laughing at the absurdity of the question and crying at the fact that he had been kind enough to ask it at all.</p><p>Just then a soot-covered boy arrived with a small pewter cup filled with water, which he offered tentatively to Aziraphale. Beside him, Crowley slowly pushed himself into a sitting position, his eyes flickering shut as he visibly struggled to steady his breathing.</p><p>“Did you pass by St Paul’s?” the tradesman asked, genuine concern in his voice. “I just saw the tower collapse—can’t imagine—”</p><p>Aziraphale accepted the pewter cup from the boy and took a cautious sip, the water seeming like an unfamiliar substance on his parched tongue. He took a couple of long draws, but it only made his stomach churn. He turned to Crowley and nudged the demon with his shoulder to get his attention.</p><p>Crowley’s golden eyes flickered open and he reached out slowly for the cup.</p><p>As he did so, his hands entered the circle of light cast by the tradesman’s lantern, and Aziraphale noticed for the first time the thick red marks ringing Crowley’s wrists. For a moment Aziraphale just stared at them in puzzlement, and then he abruptly remembered the chains that had bound Crowley in the crypt. They’d been made of iron—and had been pressed tightly against Crowley’s skin all that time he had been trapped in the crypt next to that bonfire.</p><p>Crowley took the cup from him, but Aziraphale couldn’t tear his eyes from what he now recognised as burns, quite deep in places and smeared with the same coating of blood and ash that covered much of Crowley’s forearms and hands. And, now that he was looking, Aziraphale could see that Crowley’s hands weren’t just trembling. The fingers of his right hand were twitching and didn’t seem to be supporting the cup very well, locked in a permanent half-curled position.</p><p>Crowley’s ruined hands retreated with the cup from the circle of light, but their departure only sparked in Aziraphale a very uncharacteristic wave of anger. The image of the four other demons strolling down the nave, gloating over what they had done to Crowley, flashed back to him, and he suddenly wished he had chosen to go after them after all. To think that they had gotten away with such a crime unpunished—un<em>chastised</em>, even—was infuriating.</p><p>He wished bitterly that he had some of his power left, so that he could go after them now and teach them a lesson they weren’t likely to forget. As it was, they were probably running rampant through the city, driving the fire even further—</p><p>Aziraphale’s thoughts were derailed as, beside him, Crowley took two quick gulps of water and then urgently shoved the cup back into Aziraphale’s hands. Aziraphale accepted it clumsily, water splashing over the rim, as Crowley started coughing again.</p><p>The demon twisted away from the circle of light and fell forward, catching himself on his only partially responsive hands as he coughed violently. Then his coughs turned into heaves, and he started bringing up mouthfuls of dark, wet-looking soot.</p><p>“Easy there,” the tradesman said, taking a worried step closer. Aziraphale immediately shifted closer as well, his simmering anger morphing seamlessly into protectiveness.</p><p>Crowley continued retching for a few moments as, beyond him, a hint of flame began licking around the building at the end of the road.</p><p>“If you can walk, you should head for the river,” the tradesman advised, noticing the fire too. “The king’s ordered this area to be cleared.”</p><p>“We will,” Aziraphale answered, moving his gaze from Crowley to the tradesman and holding out the pewter cup. “Thank you.”</p><p>The tradesman nodded, and once the boy had taken the cup they hurried off down the street, towards several other stragglers.</p><p>“My dear?” Aziraphale asked softly when the tradesman had gone, turning back to Crowley. The demon remained hunched over, sucking in quick, hoarse breaths but at least no longer coughing or heaving. He nodded shakily.</p><p>Aziraphale waited until Crowley had pushed himself into a sitting position before starting to climb to his feet.</p><p>“Wait,” Crowley began, his voice hoarse and cracked. “You should know…this is Hell’s doing. Beelzebub’s orders.”</p><p>Aziraphale paused, looking over at his friend. “I know. I mean, I guessed as much.”</p><p>Crowley blinked at him, the motion making his serpentine eyes vanish momentarily in the darkness. “You did? When?”</p><p>“Not long ago,” Aziraphale replied, unsure why Crowley was asking. “Just on the way to the cathedral. I thought the demons responsible might be there.” His gaze drifted over Crowley’s shoulder as the fire started climbing up the building at the end of the road. “We need to go.”</p><p>He heaved himself to his feet and then reached down to offer Crowley a hand, but the demon was already straightening up on his own. He seemed a bit unsteady on his feet, though, so Aziraphale again tried to offer a hand of support, but this time Crowley didn’t see it, looking down the road at the crackling flames.</p><p>Aziraphale retracted his hand and fiddled with the singed frills on the end of his sleeve instead. “There’s nothing more we can do here,” he said as gently as he could, knowing it was true and hating that it was.</p><p>Crowley nodded and turned back towards him. Without another word, they headed for the river.</p>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Reflections</h2></a>
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    <p> </p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>Thus I left it this afternoon burning, a resemblance of Sodom, or the last day … London was, but is no more.</p>
</blockquote><p>–John Evelyn, from his diary, September 3rd, 1666</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>From the relative safety of the wherry making its way across the river, it looked like the entire world was on fire. The whole northern bank of the Thames was aflame, an enormous inferno that reached from the Tower of London to Temple. The wind was still blowing fiercely from the east, ruffling the dark river and driving the smoke and fire further west still. They could hear the inferno even from here, the roar of the flames mixed in with the cracks of collapsing buildings and the cries of men and animals. Burning debris littered the Thames, floating half-submerged in the dark water and casting fiery reflections across its rippling surface so that it looked like the river itself was burning.</p><p>The white disc of the moon hung low on the horizon, adding a faint silvery cast to the edges of a scene otherwise illuminated by a terrible reddish glow. The sea of smoke overhead blotted out any other sense of normalcy the sky could have afforded, painting over the places where the stars should have hung.</p><p>It looked like Hell; like a painting from the mind of a feverish, crazed artist; like Armageddon itself. Except it wasn’t Armageddon, and it wasn’t Hell, and it certainly wasn’t trapped within the imagination of a lunatic.</p><p>It was their home, and it was burning.</p><p>Aziraphale and Crowley sat side by side on the end of the wherry as it made its way towards Southwark as quickly as the watermen could take it. The rest of the boat was piled high with goods belonging to a rather wealthy mercer. The man himself was at the other end of the wherry, talking with the watermen as they stroked the boat away from the burning city. He hadn’t been too keen on letting Crowley and Aziraphale come aboard, but Aziraphale had convinced him to change his mind with several guineas from his satin-lined purse, which had somehow managed to survive everything that had happened.</p><p>Now, the two man-shaped beings sat alone on their end of the wherry, gazing over at the city they had looked after for centuries. They made a sorry sight, both of them covered from head to foot in ash and soot, clothing burned and rumpled beyond recognition. Crowley’s hands were resting in his lap, wrists burned red and black. Both were breathing raggedly, lungs seared by the heat and smoke, strength all but spent, sharing in the grief of their lost home.</p><p>The fire had spread a good deal further west than St Paul’s by now, and Aziraphale’s gaze lingered especially on those flames. While in the midst of the inferno, there had been no time for serious thought or reflection, the swiftness of his actions measured against the speed of the fire’s approach. But here, for the first time, Aziraphale had enough breathing space to work through the events of the last few hours, and the repercussions of what he had done.</p><p>In St Paul’s, as the cathedral had threatened to fall down around him, he had faced a terrible choice. He’d had the opportunity to send the demons responsible for the inferno blazing in front of him now back to Hell for good. He’d had the opportunity to stop this disaster in its tracks, and yet…he hadn’t.</p><p>The decision had seemed such an easy one at the time, the idea of acres yet to be burned a mere mathematical hypothetical compared to the physical immediacy of Crowley, trapped and in need of help only metres away.</p><p>But the abstractness of that trade-off was gone now, and, as Aziraphale gazed out over the immense expanse of the burning city, he wondered what the cost of his decision had been. He could see the fire engulfing Baynard’s Castle and St Martin Church—those were real places, not abstract figures. The little shop where Aziraphale liked to get his scones near the Royal Exchange would be long gone by now. So too the Old Swan tavern on Thames Street. And it wasn’t just his own haunts to lament—the goldsmith’s shop where Crowley lived was almost certainly engulfed by flames, and the Guildhall too. Even the kind tradesman they’d encountered must have suffered great losses: his house, shop, and livelihood gone. And the destruction of every square inch of land west of St Paul’s was directly and undeniably Aziraphale’s fault.</p><p>He had let the demons escape. He had let them redouble their fiery assault on the city, likely imbuing the already terrifying flames with demonic abandon and resistance to human fire-fighting methods.</p><p>Every bit of angelic good sense Aziraphale possessed told him he’d done the wrong thing. He should have saved the city, should have cast out the demons and used his remaining strength to fight back the flames. Who knew how many innocent Londoners were dying right now, eaten alive by flames or smothered by that dark, caustic smoke because of him? And all because he had chosen to save Crowley. Because the thought of his friend—his <em>sworn enemy</em>—facing a difficult discorporation had mattered more to him in that moment than the lives of all those humans he was tasked to protect.</p><p>Yet, despite this ironclad, indisputable logic and the intense guilt Aziraphale felt at watching the city burn, he knew that, if given the opportunity to relive that day’s events with everything he knew now, he wouldn’t change a thing. Though it terrified Aziraphale to admit it, he was willing to stand by and watch the city burn, so long as he could do so next to Crowley.</p><p>All of which led him to a question of staggering importance to which he had no answer: <em>why?</em></p><p>The fact that he didn’t know scared the hell out of him.</p><p>As if reading his mind, Crowley spoke. “Why did you save me?” His voice was small and cracked, and his eyes didn’t leave the blazing city. “Why’d you save me even though you knew I was responsible?”</p><p>Aziraphale looked over at the demon and had no answer for him.</p><p>Crowley looked absolutely exhausted and somewhat ill, his skin very pale under the smears of ash. His shoulder-length hair, usually so carefully combed and artfully curled, lay in twisted tangles across his cheekbones. His eyes remained fixed on the burning city, serpentine irises reflecting the flames, a tactile reminder of the choice that had been put before Aziraphale and the option he had chosen.</p><p>But, despite the firelight playing across Crowley’s features from the burning city, and the downtrodden, exhausted expression on his face, Aziraphale thought suddenly that he looked beautiful. But also fragile—so fragile. Precious. Irreplaceable. <em>Dear.</em></p><p>And Aziraphale had his answer.</p><p>He felt the skin around his eyes burn slightly, not as a result of the smoke but of something else entirely. Because Crowley <em>was</em> dear to him. He’d started using the word to refer to Crowley some time ago, but after a while he’d begun to forget what it meant, the literal meaning of such a common phrase. That Crowley was precious, irreplaceable. And <em>his</em>…if only in Aziraphale’s mind.</p><p>He wondered when that had happened.</p><p>He wondered what Heaven would do when they found out.</p><p>“I—I tried to stop it,” Crowley said, voice cracking, when Aziraphale failed to answer his question. His head dipped forward, tangled hair falling forward to hide his expression. “Beelzebub herself commanded it. I didn’t have time to talk her out of it.” He paused, his damaged hands twisting in his lap. “I did what I could to give the city more time to fight back. I tried—”</p><p>“I know,” Aziraphale interrupted as gently as he could. “It’s all right.”</p><p>Crowley broke off, his fingers twitching painfully. Aziraphale wished he had enough power to heal his friend’s burned wrists. They must have hurt tremendously.</p><p>“There’s something else,” Crowley rasped. “I didn’t realise it until Izkamon and the others arrived with the orders, but…do you remember Thomas Decker? Years ago? And that pamphlet I got him to write, the one about the seven sins of London?”</p><p>It took Aziraphale a few moments to locate the exact memory. Crowley had been delighted to show him the freshly printed pamphlet, which condemned such sins as bankruptcy, ‘candle-light,’ apishness, and shaving, all with such overblown vitriol that the pamphlet had seemed like some sort of jest. It had been a good laugh.</p><p>Aziraphale couldn’t imagine laughing anymore.</p><p>“Yeah,” he affirmed.</p><p>Crowley nodded, his head still tilted down. “I submitted an advance copy with one of my reports. I guess that’s why Below decided London needed to burn. I had proven that its citizens belonged to Hell. And they wanted to get all the souls they could…before Heaven had a chance to win them back.”</p><p>Aziraphale didn’t move, absorbing the information as a dull ache spread through his chest. All this hadn’t been about burning the city, then—it had been about stealing souls for Hell before their time. <em>That</em> was what Aziraphale had been party to—what <em>Heaven</em> had been party to. What Aziraphale had been willing to trade for Crowley’s life.</p><p>Crowley didn’t say anything more, face still downturned. Aziraphale, too wrapped up in his own frightening realizations, remained silent also.</p><p>The wherry slowed as it reached the centre of the river, the watermen drawing up their oars and letting the boat drift for a moment. The muted sounds of talking from the other end of the wherry fell silent, everyone taking a few seconds to mourn for the city they had lost.</p><p> </p><p>🔥🔥🔥</p><p> </p><p>Crowley stared out over the dark, flickering water, feeling sick to his stomach at the thought of what he had done. For three days, he had helped lay waste to the city that he loved above all others. He had allowed the Royal Exchange to go up in flames; he had helped the fire spread to St Paul’s. But while the destruction of the fabric of the city was lamentable, the loss of life was unthinkable.</p><p>The sequence that kept playing on a loop in his mind was of the maid. She’d worked for Farriner, the baker in whose house the demons had started the fire. They’d lit it on the ground floor, in a heap of kindling not far from Farriner’s oven. As they’d retreated, Crowley had purposefully knocked over a bucket, hoping the noise would awaken the house’s inhabitants before the fire grew too large to contain. His ruse had worked, but the other demons hadn’t been keen on letting their first victims escape and had encouraged the fire to grow larger and more vicious with a touch of demonic magic. Farriner and his children had escaped by fleeing out an upstairs window and climbing onto the adjacent roof, but the maid hadn’t. She’d been too afraid to cross the gap between the houses, even with all of Farriner’s panicked urging. She had died there, engulfed in the flames. Crowley had stood by in the shadows on the other side of the street and watched in barely masked horror while the other demons snickered and gloated.</p><p>She must have been the first of hundreds to die in the fire, Crowley knew. Thousands, even. He couldn’t imagine how many souls he’d personally dispatched in just the last few days. How many he had condemned to death for the sake of a stupid pamphlet.</p><p>The vast majority of Crowley’s work was in temptations. Little things meant to sway humanity to freely damn themselves, often while Crowley had a bit of a laugh in the process. He quite liked the work, actually, coming up with increasingly creative mischiefs to throw at humanity and see how they reacted, but <em>this</em>…this was an atrocity of a different magnitude altogether. This was the wholesale slaughter of innocents, and it turned his stomach.</p><p>Projects like this came along once or twice a millennium, big shows of Hell’s power that served to make a point to Heaven as much as to bring ruin to humanity. While the exact nature of the project varied every time—sacking a city, wiping out half a civilization—it always ended the same way: great death and destruction, and Crowley’s hands soaked in blood.</p><p>Though Crowley understood logically that he wasn’t to blame, just a cog in Hell’s infernal machine, this never did much to alleviate the fact that Crowley had been the one to physically carry out the orders. In Constantinople, Crowley had been the one to urge the Crusaders to loot the holy sanctuaries; on Crete, he’d been the one to barricade the doors of the palace even as the volcano erupted; and now, he’d been the one standing by while Farriner’s maid died, and no amount of reasoning could change all that. The only thing he could do was try to put it behind him and move forward as best he could.</p><p>Except, this time, Crowley had tried a bit harder than usual to <em>not</em> follow his orders. He’d undermined Izkamon and the others any way he could think of that wasn’t too obvious, but in the end he hadn’t been careful enough. They’d somehow discovered that Crowley was working at cross-purposes to them and had turned on him in St Paul’s. But though Izkamon and the others were a cruel group, Crowley’s saving grace had been that they weren’t particularly bright. After some dramatic pleading and only half-faked stammering, he’d managed to convince them that his objection to the fire was entirely due to an aesthetic appreciation for the city’s buildings. They’d fallen for this fabrication hook, line, and sinker, and decided that the proper corrective action was a painful discorporation in one of the buildings Crowley professed to love so much.</p><p>They’d drained him of his powers and chained him up in the crypt, making sure to leave him with his own personal fire so that they could be assured the flames would kill him before the collapsing building did. As a demon, Crowley was partially resistant to fire, but in this case it just meant that he would have burned to death much more slowly, like Izkamon and the others wanted.</p><p>But, for all their cruelty, they had been <em>stupid</em>. They’d let Crowley get away with undermining their plans with just a painful discorporation to show for it. Had they possessed one ounce of genuine intelligence between them, they might have seen through Crowley’s deceit and realised that, somewhere along the line, Crowley’s demonic morals had been severely compromised. And that would have well and truly been the end of him.</p><p>Except…even if they had been that clever, there was a good chance he would have made it out alive anyway, because Aziraphale had rescued him. Because, for some reason, Aziraphale had decided to save a demon from being killed in a catastrophe he himself had created.</p><p>Crowley turned his head towards Aziraphale slightly, catching sight of the angel’s silhouette in the darkness, illuminated by the flames. Whatever impulse had driven Aziraphale to do such a thing, Crowley wished he could believe it lived in the angel still. But if there was one thing Crowley had learned over five and a half millennia of committing atrocities on Hell’s behalf, it was that Aziraphale never saw him the same afterwards.</p><p>One of Aziraphale’s defining traits, Crowley had always thought, was his capacity for self-delusion. If turning a blind eye to something meant avoiding personal inconvenience, then Aziraphale was only too happy to oblige. One such area was his association with Crowley, the wisdom of which Crowley knew the angel harboured serious doubts about. But so long as Crowley kept to his usual routine of low-level temptations and troublemaking, Aziraphale could dismiss Crowley’s actions as not seriously dangerous, and therefore permissible. And so long as Crowley’s Hellish nature could be overlooked, so too could Aziraphale’s friendship with him.</p><p>Until, that was, Hell decided to stir up trouble again. The sheer <em>magnitude</em> of these acts of destruction shook Aziraphale out of his comfortable delusions, tearing down his carefully built walls of self-deception. And so too went whatever charitable lens the angel saw the world through, leaving everything rendered in black and white. There was no room for morally ambiguous friendships in the aftermath of such wanton destruction. All of his and Aziraphale’s shared history seemed to dissolve in the angel’s eyes, all the offered bottles of wine and friendly chats and casual evenings falling away to reveal the core of what Crowley was, the one part of his nature he could not change and could never escape. He was a demon, and that meant that he was entirely and eternally beholden to Hell. And because of that connection, he could never be fully trusted, never be entirely relied upon…and certainly never be a friend to an angel.</p><p>And thus Crowley had come to dread Hell’s big projects with a two-fold fear, the first of the atrocity itself and the second of the aftermath, when Aziraphale would remember exactly what Crowley was, and what that meant. In the wake of each of Hell’s great disasters, Aziraphale had made it abundantly clear that he wanted no further association with a creature such as Crowley. The angel was not always able to make good on his declaration and physically leave, as he was often needed to help the survivors, but when he could he did.</p><p>In the early days, Crowley had tried to talk Aziraphale around, hoping to get him to understand that Crowley had had no choice in what had happened, but no amount of pleading, reasoning, or arguing had done any good. Because, in the end, the problem wasn’t with what Crowley had <em>done</em> so much as what he <em>was</em>. He suspected that the angel, in the same academic way that Crowley did, understood that Crowley wasn’t truly to blame—and, indeed, he must have, given how many atrocities Heaven had ordered Aziraphale to commit over the years—but that didn’t change the fact of what Crowley was, and what Aziraphale was, and what they could never be together.</p><p>But, in the end, Aziraphale had always come around: rebuilding his stronghold of self-delusion and convincing himself anew that there was no true harm in continuing his association with Crowley. Sometimes this process took decades, sometimes centuries, once just a couple of years, but to Crowley’s immense relief the angel had always taken him back. Not that this stopped Crowley from dreading every new atrocity anyway, plagued with the lingering fear that the next disaster would be the last straw on the camel’s back, the obstacle finally too large for Aziraphale’s psyche to surmount. That, upon remembering how unwise it was to continue a friendship that was bound to end in ruin, Aziraphale might elect to simply never return to it.</p><p>Crowley honestly didn’t know what he would do if that happened, especially now, after so long. Even the prospect of the regular cold-shouldering of a couple of decades seemed almost unthinkable. It had been centuries since the last major project Hell had tasked him, and he and Aziraphale had become much more…<em>comfortable</em> with each other over the intervening years. They’d been spending a great deal of time together lately, largely because the pace of human invention had increased and there was so much more to see and do. And Crowley had to admit that all of that proximity had made Aziraphale’s tendencies towards self-delusion rub off on him, too. Among all the new glamours of life on Earth, it was so easy for Crowley to pretend that Hell didn’t have a direct stranglehold over his life, easy to believe he was free to act as he wished. Easy to believe that it could all work out, a friendship between an angel and a demon.</p><p>But Hell had come back, as they always did, testing Crowley’s loyalty with this fresh new atrocity, the burning of the city that was both his and Aziraphale’s home. And now that the deed was done, all Crowley had to look forward to was the prospect of Aziraphale remembering that Crowley wasn’t really his friend and never could be. He’d known this was coming from the start, from the moment he’d received his orders from Beelzebub, but that didn’t do anything to lessen the sting.</p><p>Crowley looked over at Aziraphale, gazing with a horrified expression at the blazing inferno, and knew that the angel was already well on the path to realization, if he hadn’t reached its conclusion already. The silence when he’d asked Aziraphale why he’d saved him had spoken just as well as words.</p><p>But the words would come next, probably soon after they’d reached the south bank. There, Aziraphale would have a means of distancing himself from Crowley that didn’t involve diving into the river. The thought of the coming rejection made his heart constrict in his chest, but Crowley did his best to bear it, the pain muddling in his head with the ever-present throbbing from his burned wrists.</p><p>He shivered a little, dropping his gaze to the dark waters and trying not to think too much about the remainder of the century, and the fact that he was likely going to spend it without his best friend.</p><p>Crowley was feeling worse than ever, his stomach tying itself into increasingly tight knots, when the sound of voices from the other side of the wherry picked up and he felt the boat jostle as it bumped into the dock. The moon had vanished behind the dark smoke, and now the only light came from the inferno on the northern bank. Even so, it was enough to see by, highlighting everything with shades of yellow and red and casting long, inky shadows. Dock workers started pulling the mercer’s goods from the wherry, and once there was an opening Crowley and Aziraphale filed off, carrying nothing but the clothes on their backs.</p><p>A line of people stood along the southern bank, staring across the river in shock and horror, their expressions lit by the blazing inferno. They came from all walks of life: rich and poor, old and young, noble and common. Babies wailed and animals cried, but for the most part it was quiet, the crowd standing vigil over the city they had been unable to save.</p><p>Crowley followed just a step behind Aziraphale, wanting to stay as close to the angel as he could, while he still could.</p><p>As they reached the edge of the initial, loose crowd of bystanders near the bank, Aziraphale slowed to a stop. He turned to Crowley and opened his mouth to say something, his posture radiating nervousness.</p><p>Spurred by a sudden desperation to make one last case for himself before Aziraphale tossed him out of his life, Crowley hastened to speak, beating Aziraphale to it.</p><p>“Angel, I—I just want to—”</p><p>“Mr Fell, is that you?” cried a voice.</p><p>Crowley broke off, his stomach actually lurching at the ill timing of the intrusion, and he turned to see a friendly-looking but rather dishevelled man approaching them, a crumpled hat in his hand. Crowley recognised him vaguely as one of Aziraphale’s acquaintances.</p><p>“Ah, Mr Hollar,” Aziraphale said in surprise as the man approached. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”</p><p>And then, with Aziraphale’s attention completely transferred to the newcomer, Crowley suddenly realised that maybe his arrival wasn’t so ill-timed after all.</p><p>Crowley could stick around until this Mr Hollar left, but then what was he going to say to Aziraphale, exactly? That he was sorry? That he hadn’t wanted to burn the city, yet had done so anyway? Was he supposed to beg for forgiveness for the senseless murder of possibly thousands of people? Apologise for being what he was? For what he had no choice but to be?</p><p>He was deluding himself still. If he stuck around, all he would learn was exactly which words Aziraphale would use to brush Crowley out of his life. And Crowley honestly didn’t know how well he’d be able to handle it, not after the relative closeness of the last few centuries. And, maybe if he didn’t actually hear Aziraphale’s rejection, the words wouldn’t haunt him as much as they usually did. Maybe it would be easier to imagine the angel didn’t hate him.</p><p>Aziraphale kept talking, but Crowley took a quiet step backwards, into the sluggish crowd of refugees surrounding them. Then, once he’d melted into the darkness, he turned and walked away, shivering a little despite the warmth of the hot, stiff breeze.</p><p>He glanced back as he went, wondering how long it’d be before he saw the angel again.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Angels & Demons</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>Yet from her Ashes <em>Phoenix</em>-like did spring</p>
  <p>Another <em>Loyal London</em> to the King.</p>
  <p>Thus from our Ruin’d City may arise,</p>
  <p>Another, whose high Towers may urge the Skies.</p>
</blockquote><p>–Joseph Guillim, “The Dreadful Burning” (excerpt), 1667</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>September 10 (Six days later)</em>
</p>
<p>Aziraphale dragged a cracked, scorched wooden board from the still-smoking remains of a building, pulling it over to a blackened but cooler piece of ground. The end of the board was itself smoking slightly, so Aziraphale stomped on it with his heel, the softened wood crumbling after a few attempts and the smoke petering off.</p>
<p>The angel drew a deep breath and straightened up, resting for a moment as he surveyed the debris.</p>
<p>After four days of raging through the city, the fire’s spread had finally been halted as the wind dropped. From Aziraphale’s estimates, the demons had ravaged the city for nearly an entire day after the burning of St Paul’s. The people of the city, rallied by Charles II himself, had tirelessly fought the fire day and night, but not much headway had been made until the demonically-inspired wind had faded. In the ensuing days, their heroic efforts had beat the fire back, while in other parts of the city it had already started dying for lack of further fuel.</p>
<p>Nearly a hundred thousand people had been displaced by the incident, many of whom had gathered in mass temporary camps in the open fields around the city. Now that the flames had mostly died down, those who had not fled the city entirely were returning to reclaim what property they could and survey the damage.</p>
<p>The immediate priority was preventing the fire from reigniting any of the still-smoking and smouldering parts of the city. A passing rain yesterday had done much to quench the fire and the fears of the citizenry, but danger still lurked in the ruined streets. Even as of two days ago, the ground had retained the heat, radiating it into the soles of the shoes of anyone brave enough to walk the scorched streets.</p>
<p>Seeing the city like this was unspeakable. Not only had every glimmer of colour vanished into the heaps of charred wood, but the <em>height</em> of the city was gone. Usually the tall, multistoried buildings boxed in the urban maze, but now all that was torn down. Aziraphale was in what had once been Cheapside, and he could see straight across the wreckage to the glimmer of the Thames. It was unreal.</p>
<p>Even finding one’s way through the debris was difficult, with so few landmarks remaining to indicate which street the viewer stood upon, if it was indeed a street at all. Particularly troubling was the absence of St Paul’s. Even without its original spire, the central tower had stood some three hundred feet tall, setting it head and shoulders above every other building in the city. Now, not only was that familiar shadow gone, but so too were the regular tollings of all the churches’ bells. The city was a skeleton of what it had been, and walking through it was like picking one’s way through the remains of fallen soldiers scattered across a battlefield.</p>
<p>Aziraphale took another deep breath and resumed tearing apart the smoking pile in front of himself. From all around him, he could hear the distant sounds of others doing the same, anyone who could work setting themself to the task of clearing the debris and eradicating any remaining pockets of fire.</p>
<p>Twenty minutes later, Aziraphale had succeeded in dispersing the worst of the smoking rubble. He started moving further up the remains of the road, the path here somewhat cleared by another group. Despite their efforts, Aziraphale’s shoes still sank into a thick layer of ash, and tiny fragments of windowpanes, bricks, and wood crackled and crunched under his feet.</p>
<p>He could hear someone shifting through the rubble ahead and turned in that direction. From the sounds and occasional grunts, he guessed that they were working alone, and he decided he might as well offer to lend a hand.</p>
<p>Aziraphale rounded the collapsed remains of what looked to have once been a rather tall inn and stumbled to a surprised halt. In front of him, intent on dragging a heavy beam from a smoking pile of debris, was a very familiar figure.</p>
<p><em>“Crowley?”</em> Aziraphale asked in astonishment.</p>
<p>Crowley looked over in surprise and froze, an expression somewhere between dread and horror stealing over his face. “Oh.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale automatically moved forward, looking between Crowley and the pile of rubble uncomprehendingly. He’d lost track of Crowley soon after the wherry had landed at Southwark and had been unable to find him in the ensuing hours. He’d feared then that the other demons had realised that Crowley had escaped his expected demise and come after him. But his search had proven fruitless, and eventually Aziraphale had been too exhausted to go on. By the end of the following day, as the wind had slacked off and the fire died, he had been forced to accept that the demons had returned to Hell, and there was a very real possibility that Crowley had gone with them.</p>
<p>But that clearly hadn’t been the case, as Crowley was standing right in front of him.</p>
<p>Not that he looked much different from the last time Aziraphale had seen him—still dressed in the same rumpled, ash-coated clothes, still visibly exhausted. The only adjustments to his attire he’d made were for ease of working: loosening some of the buttons on his black velvet doublet and rolling up the sleeves of his ash-coated linen shirt. As for his person, Crowley still looked rather ill and pale, though at least the worst of the burn marks around his wrists were gone.</p>
<p>But he was <em>safe</em>, whole and intact and very much not accosted by demons, and Aziraphale could hardly believe this change in fortunes.</p>
<p>“You—you’re here!” Aziraphale cried in relief, striding forward and just barely restraining himself from throwing his arms around his friend, unsure how Crowley would react to that.</p>
<p>Crowley turned his head away and slowly set down the end of the beam. “Yeah. Sorry.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale slowed to a stop, a confused smile spreading across his face. “Sorry? Whatever for?”</p>
<p>“That you bumped into me,” Crowley explained, straightening up and dusting his hands off almost nervously. “I’ll just go.”</p>
<p>“What? No!” Aziraphale protested quickly, stepping after Crowley even as he made to retreat. “Hang on. I was so worried about you!”</p>
<p>Crowley lurched to a halt, looking back in confusion. “What?”</p>
<p>“When I couldn’t find you Southwark, I—I thought those demons might have come back to get you—”</p>
<p>Crowley blinked at him, looking taken aback. “You…looked for me?”</p>
<p>Aziraphale read the surprise in his friend’s face and quickly backpedalled, struggling to ignore an unexpected stab of disappointment in his chest. “I…well…after all that work saving you in the first place…”</p>
<p>“But you—” Crowley began, still sounding perplexed. “Don’t you…?”</p>
<p>The two of them trailed off, just staring at each other.</p>
<p>“The demons didn’t come after me,” Crowley said at length. “Haven’t seen them since St Paul’s. Seems like they buggered off.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale absorbed this. “But then…what happened? Why’d you leave? Was it on purpose?”</p>
<p>Again, Crowley seemed surprised by the question. “I thought you—I thought you wanted me to.” Crowley glanced away, moving back to the beam and poking it with his foot. “Wanted some space, that is. After I…after what happened.”</p>
<p>“Why would I want that?” Aziraphale asked, baffled. “You thought I wanted you to leave?”</p>
<p>Crowley looked up at him then, his expression a bit lost, and Aziraphale watched a series of muddled emotions pass over his friend’s face. Then they resolved into a sort of horrified, resigned dread, and Crowley looked away, his Adam’s apple wavering. “Didn’t you hear me, before? I helped Hell burn the city. It was even my idea in the first place.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale blinked, confused and a little alarmed. “I know.”</p>
<p>Crowley reached down to pick up the end of the beam again, voice a bit stiff. “Do you?”</p>
<p>Aziraphale frowned. “Yes?”</p>
<p>Crowley gave a sour grunt of disbelief and resumed his attempts to drag the beam out of the heap of debris. “Hell gave the order and I carried it out. The city burned because of me. Think about it.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale took a confused step closer. “My dear, I know all that. I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”</p>
<p>Crowley didn’t respond, his jaw locked, but he succeeded in dragging the beam a few inches further, its end beginning to pull free of the pile.</p>
<p>“If you would just—”</p>
<p>Crowley’s hands tightened around the beam as his entire body tensed, his voice wavering but much sharper than it had been before. “Do you want me to say it for you, is that it? Need me to spell it out?”</p>
<p>Aziraphale frowned, alarmed. “Well, there’s no need for that kind of attitude—”</p>
<p>Crowley forcibly dropped the end of the beam, its impact with the ground sending up a small cloud of ash, and he straightened up, his hands shaking. “No? Well, clearly there is. If you want me to say it, then I’ll bloody well say it. I killed people, all right? I watched a woman burn to death and didn’t do a bleeding thing to stop it. I burned my own home to the ground and killed thousands of innocent people because Hell told me to. <em>That’s</em> what I am. Who I am. Who I’ll always be. A demon, a monster, the scourge of the very Earth itself, a—a—a creature so abhorrent that even its creator couldn’t bring Herself to love it.” Crowley abruptly turned away, his voice breaking. “There, is that enough? Do you understand now? Are you sssatisfied?”</p>
<p>“Crowley!” Aziraphale exclaimed in horror. “You—you’re not—don’t say things like that.” He moved forward and put his hand on his friend’s elbow, trying to get him to turn back around.</p>
<p>Crowley roughly shook off Aziraphale’s hand and moved another pace away, one hand moving to rub at his opposite wrist. “Like you’re not thinking it.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale felt like he’d been slapped. “I—I am not!”</p>
<p>Crowley came to a stop, his shoes throwing up more ash and his back to Aziraphale. “Then why aren’t you?”</p>
<p>Aziraphale stared at his friend. “Why aren’t I?” he echoed. “My dear…why would I? Haven’t I…aren’t we…?”</p>
<p>Crowley kicked at the ground, sending up a fresh cloud of ash. “Oh, don’t give me that,” he said bitterly, turning to the side and taking a few agitated strides across the width of the road. “It’s not like this is the first time. I know how the script goes.”</p>
<p>“The script…?” Aziraphale repeated, lost, and then the pieces finally began to slot together in his head. “Wait—do you mean like <em>Nineveh?”</em></p>
<p>“Yeah,” Crowley agreed sullenly, striding over to the nearest pile of rubble and giving it a good kick. “And Crete. And Constantinople. And Ur.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale stared at Crowley, aghast. “But that was—was—<em>millennia</em> ago, Crowley!”</p>
<p>“Constantinople wasn’t,” Crowley shot back.</p>
<p>Aziraphale watched his friend, dismayed. He could honestly say he had never considered those instances linked, though he realised now that he had reacted very similarly each time. Crete, Constantinople, Ur—those were all places Crowley had helped Hell carry out an atrocity.</p>
<p><em>Or</em>, Aziraphale mentally corrected himself, <em>more accurately, Hell commanded Crowley to carry out an atrocity.</em></p>
<p>Then Aziraphale suddenly realised that that distinction was what made all the difference.</p>
<p>In the past, whenever something like this had happened, he had felt a genuine sense of disquiet about the wisdom of continuing a friendship with a demon. But the duration of that disquiet had been rapidly declining, especially recently. The more he got to know Crowley, and the more time that elapsed without any consequences coming to bear, the more confident Aziraphale grew that there was nothing fundamentally immoral about their friendship. Besides, how could there be? He loved it so very much.</p>
<p>But, this time, he hadn’t felt even a twinge of that guilt. On the contrary, he had been certain from the first that Crowley was as much a victim of Hell’s malevolence as anyone else in the city, enough to save him before thinking of saving anyone else. Before even thinking of saving his <em>books</em>.</p>
<p>Because, somewhere in the intervening centuries, Crowley had become not someone to run <em>from</em> in times of disaster, but someone to run <em>to</em>. Someone worth saving, no matter the cost.</p>
<p>“Look,” Crowley said almost calmly when several long moments had passed and Aziraphale still hadn’t responded. “I get it, I really do. You’re an angel. I’m a demon. It’s my fault the city burned down. I know… I’m grateful that you saved me, but I know you regret it. It’s okay. Just go and…and take your time. I’ll be here.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale’s eyes locked back onto Crowley and he was horrified anew, at not just the thought of what Crowley was going through now, but at what Aziraphale had subjected him to in the past. He moved forward, reaching out towards where Crowley stood half-turned away from him but stopping himself short, not wanting the demon to recoil again. “My dear…I don’t want to leave. And I certainly don’t regret saving you. Please believe that.”</p>
<p>Crowley was silent for so long that Aziraphale was beginning to wonder if he’d even heard him, but then the demon looked around and met Aziraphale’s gaze for the first time. Crowley was visibly upset and clearly trying hard not to show it, but beneath the veneer of imposed calm Aziraphale could see the pain in his friend’s serpentine eyes, accompanied by a hope so fragile that it broke Aziraphale’s heart.</p>
<p>Then Crowley blinked and looked away, and all the fight seemed to drain out of him. He started rubbing one of his wrists again, where a thick white scar marked the place where the chains had bit into his skin.</p>
<p>“I do mean it,” Aziraphale pressed, moving cautiously closer. “None of this is your fault and I really don’t blame you in the slightest.”</p>
<p>Crowley shook his head, a miserable expression stealing across his features. “How can you say that? I wrote the pamphlet, I helped light the flames. Whether I wanted to or not, I’m no innocent in this. Even I can see that.”</p>
<p>“But…but you didn’t <em>mean</em> to.”</p>
<p>“That doesn’t make all these people any less dead, does it?”</p>
<p>Aziraphale gave a short sigh. “You didn’t have a choice. I of all people should appreciate that. Heaven…I know I make a lot of excuses for them, but they’ve done things I haven’t agreed with, given me orders I had to carry out. And I know it’s the same with Hell. But what Hell makes you <em>do</em> isn’t who you <em>are</em>. It’s what you do when you’re free to make your own choice that decides that. And <em>you</em>…”</p>
<p>Aziraphale drew a breath and then paused, at a loss for how to articulate what he was feeling. Then he latched onto the perfect example. “<em>This</em> is you, Crowley. Hell’s been out of the picture for…what? Just days? But <em>this</em> is where I find you: working to rebuild the very city you were forced to destroy. <em>That’s</em> who you are—who you really are—and Hell can never change that. And maybe…maybe I didn’t realise that before, in Constantinople and Crete and all those other places—but I know it now. And I…I’m truly very sorry if I ever made you think otherwise.”</p>
<p>Crowley, who’d been watching Aziraphale as he spoke, looked away again as he finished, but not so quickly that Aziraphale missed how the tip of Crowley’s nose had reddened. The demon was quiet for a moment more, half-turned away from Aziraphale, his fingers still tracing the scar ringing his wrist. “Do you mean that?” he asked at length.</p>
<p>Aziraphale’s mouth twisted sadly. “Of course I do. I’m just sorry I didn’t realise it until now.”</p>
<p>“Mm.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale looked down at his own hands, usually so clean and tidy but currently caked with dust and ash. “And there’s something else, about Heaven. I should have told you about it earlier, but I… Well, once I realised that demons were responsible for setting the fire, I contacted Heaven. I had hoped they might help fight the fire, since Hell had already stepped over the usual non-interference line.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale saw Crowley blink, the demon still partially turned away from him. “You did? What did they say?”</p>
<p>“They refused to help,” Aziraphale admitted. “In fact, they said it was part of the Plan. I don’t know how that could be, but they were quite adamant. So, while your side may have started the fire, my side condoned it. Hell is not the only responsible party. If you insist on bearing the blame for Hell’s misdeeds, then I too must be held liable.”</p>
<p>Crowley was silent for a moment. “That’s…they really said that? That it was part of the Plan?”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>Crowley seemed to mull that over. “That can’t bode well, I’m sure. Did they say anything else? Impending divine intervention, etcetera?”</p>
<p>Aziraphale shook his head. “Not a thing.”</p>
<p>Crowley fell silent again, still half-turned towards Aziraphale, neither approaching nor retreating.</p>
<p>“With Heaven and Hell fixed on the same plan, I fear this disaster would have happened with or without us,” Aziraphale offered.</p>
<p>Crowley nodded slowly, looking pensive.</p>
<p>Aziraphale gave him a moment more, fiddling nervously with the frilly ends of his sleeves. Then he took a cautious step closer, unwilling to let Crowley stand there alone but not wanting to scare him off either. “Look, I…I understand if you want some time to yourself, but please don’t do it on my account. I didn’t mean to…to push you away, or make you feel unwanted.”</p>
<p>Crowley looked over at him then, and he gave a faint, slightly choked laugh. “Remember who you’re talking to, angel.”</p>
<p>“And who’s that?”</p>
<p>“A demon.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale gave Crowley a kind, relieved smile. “Nah. A friend, I’d say.”</p>
<p>Crowley looked away again, but this time it was clearly to hide the hint of colour rising to his cheeks. “I wouldn’t say that too loudly,” he remarked, moving towards where the beam still lay in the middle of the road. “Gabriel might hear you.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale took a step after him, encouraged by the lighter tone in Crowley’s voice. “It ought to be safe enough. I don’t expect Heaven will be very interested in what’s going on down here for a little while, now that the fire’s over.”</p>
<p>“Good riddance for that, at least,” Crowley said, stopping by the end of the beam. “I’ve had quite enough of them.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale huffed a laugh. “I suppose you have.”</p>
<p>“And they’re not the only ones I’ve had enough of,” Crowley grumbled, leaning over to pick up the end of the beam.</p>
<p>Aziraphale blinked at him in puzzlement, and it took him a moment to realise that he meant Hell. A demon displeased with his orders from Hell and an angel unhappy with his instructions from Heaven: the two of them made quite the pair, really.</p>
<p>“Well, are you going to stand there all day or come help me with this?” Crowley complained loudly, tugging ineffectually on his end of the beam.</p>
<p>Aziraphale shook himself back to the present and moved towards the other end of the beam. He met Crowley’s eye as he did so and gave him a kind smile. “My dear, I would love to.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Resurgam</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Last chapter! Then, just the author’s note~</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <em>Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice.</em>
  </p>
  <p>[Reader, if it is a monument you seek, look around you.]</p>
</blockquote><p>–The Latin inscription at Sir Christopher Wren’s grave, and also inscribed on the floor of St Paul’s cathedral, directly under the dome. (Composed by Wren’s son, also named Christopher)</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Aziraphale and Crowley worked until the sun was riding low in the sky, both of them near-exhausted from their labours. Their work clearing the streets had led them most of the way to St Paul’s, where one remaining wall stood upright, rising like a ship’s mast from the desolation surrounding it.</p><p>Once they had mutually agreed to stop for the evening, the two picked their way through the remaining rubble between them and the cathedral.</p><p>They came to a stop in the scorched churchyard at the cathedral’s southern flank, looking up at the remains of the once-proud structure. The beautiful rose window was gone, and the place where the choir and crypt had been was an enormous pile of rubble. In some places, one half of an arch remained upright, a forlorn testament to its fallen partner. The ground around the cathedral had been scorched black, but the stones were a dusty white, bleached by the fire. Near the base of the walls, Aziraphale could see several big grey splotches sprawled across the scorched ground. It took him a moment to realise they were puddles of lead from the roof, melted by the sheer heat of the inferno and then solidified again with its passing. The scene was completed by scraps of half-burned paper tumbling across the rubble-strewn remains of the churchyard, fluttering back and forth in the faint breeze like the lost souls of the books they had once belonged to.</p><p>Aziraphale and Crowley weren’t the only people who had been drawn to the remains of the city’s proudest building. In fact, it looked to have become a bit of a temporary base for the teams working on clearing the wreckage, because there were people milling about and even a man selling cups of something from a nearby cart. Several people were staring despondently at the ruined cathedral, and others still were beginning to cautiously explore the smoking ruins.</p><p>“Want some of whatever that bloke’s selling?” Crowley asked, jerking his head in the direction of the cart.</p><p>Aziraphale nodded and they walked over. The man had several large pots of soup, none of which would have smelled particularly good on an ordinary day, but which seemed now to Aziraphale to be some of the best-smelling soup he’d ever encountered.</p><p>Once he and Crowley had their cups—the cups themselves banged-up tin receptacles that the man asked them to return—they found seats on a small heap of stone rubble in the churchyard. They sipped their soup as they looked at the broken remains of the cathedral and the people milling around at its base.</p><p>“I—I did try to stop the fire, you know,” Crowley said at length.</p><p>Aziraphale looked over at him and saw Crowley staring into his soup, the cup resting on his lap.</p><p>“Got them to start the fire at Pudding Lane, where the goods aren’t as flammable. Raised the alarm as soon as I could, that sort of thing.” Crowley ran a finger along the cup’s rim. “And it was my idea to keep the wind blowing west. I think maybe that was a mistake, but it made sense at the time. I had to keep the fire away from the Tower of London. God, we were so close to it. Do you know they store the Crown’s gunpowder supply there? If the fire had reached it—if it had gone up…” Crowley broke off, looking down at his soup. “It wasn’t enough, but I want you to know I did try to stop it. I didn’t want this to happen.”</p><p>Aziraphale nodded and, on impulse, reached over and gently touched Crowley on the arm, on the sleeve of his velvet doublet. “I know, my dear. And it’s really not your fault.”</p><p>Crowley nodded, and when Aziraphale retracted his hand he busied himself with taking another sip of soup.</p><p>They returned their attention to the cathedral, where several figures were picking through the rubble, evidently looking for anything salvageable.</p><p>“So many people lost everything,” Crowley said after a long while. “Their livelihoods, their homes…”</p><p>Aziraphale nodded.</p><p>Crowley fiddled with his cup. “There are enough fires in this city, you’d think people would be more prepared. Or there’d be someone they could turn to just in case a disaster struck, to help people out. The Crown can only do so much.”</p><p>Aziraphale hummed agreement.</p><p>“Even if it’s a system people pay into. There’s got to be a way. Then, at least, all these people would have enough money that they wouldn’t have to sleep out in Moorfields. It’ll be getting cold soon. A person can’t survive out there.”</p><p>Aziraphale nodded and wondered suddenly if that’s where Crowley had been sleeping lately—out in some field. A heartbeat later, he remembered what he’d been about to ask Crowley in Southwark before Mr Hollar’s inopportune interruption.</p><p>“Say, did your…I’m guessing your place burned down?” Aziraphale asked carefully.</p><p>Crowley nodded, looking into his cup of soup again. “Not much left, but there wasn’t much there to begin with, to be honest.” He took another sip.</p><p>“And you…?”</p><p>Crowley shrugged.</p><p>“You could…that is to say, my shop’s still in one piece. Thanks to you, of course, encouraging me to get that plot in Soho, out away from the city. Felt a bit far from the action at the time, but it’s shaping up to be a nice neighbourhood.”</p><p>Crowley gave a grunt of assent and took another sip of soup.</p><p>“Well, anyway,” Aziraphale stammered, getting back on point, “there’s plenty of room, if you needed somewhere to stay. You know. Temporarily.”</p><p>Crowley looked over at him, and from his expression Aziraphale guessed he was trying to work out if Aziraphale meant what he said. Aziraphale gave him a nervous smile.</p><p>Crowley’s gazed dropped back at his soup, his hands tightening around the tin cup. “That’d be grand, angel,” he said softly.</p><p>Aziraphale nodded and took another sip of his own soup, trying not to read too much into the sincere gratitude in Crowley’s voice.</p><p>Before the silence could grow too long, Aziraphale hastily cleared his throat and cast about for another topic. “They really are serious about rebuilding, you know,” he said, indicating the industrious humans around them with his cup. “Look at them all.”</p><p>Crowley nodded and was silent for a moment. “They should rebuild the cathedral.”</p><p>Aziraphale made a noise of amusement. “A demon advocating the building of a church?”</p><p>Crowley shrugged and took another sip of his soup.</p><p>“Well, it needed plenty of rebuilding before, even,” Aziraphale commented. “What with the spire gone and everything. And all those people going in and out at all times of day! The merchants and vagrants and…well…<em>ladies of the night</em>. Heaven wouldn’t have been pleased.”</p><p>Crowley nodded again, almost sadly. “I liked it. All those people—it was full of life. A real symbol of the city. They may have built that church for Heaven, but it belonged to humanity. And it was…it was really nice.”</p><p>Aziraphale gave Crowley a sad smile. “That it was.”</p><p>They sat in silence for a while longer, sipping their soup and looking at the saddened remnants of the heart of London.</p><p>“There were…books,” Crowley said after a long moment. “In the crypt. They must have all burned. Were they very valuable?”</p><p>Aziraphale knew he meant in terms of lost knowledge, not their price in pounds, but he had to admit he was a bit surprised by the question nonetheless. Crowley had never shown much of an interest in books before.</p><p>“A few, probably,” Aziraphale replied. “It was the booksellers’ entire stock. But that meant they were mostly copies of the same book, all freshly printed.”</p><p>“Oh, good,” Crowley said, sounding oddly relieved. “I couldn’t tell much down there—too much smoke.”</p><p>Aziraphale nodded.</p><p>“I—I’m sorry they burned, though,” Crowley offered. “I know how much you like books.”</p><p>Aziraphale looked over at him and only then realised that he hadn’t actually given the books in the crypt much thought at all. Maybe it had been because he’d been so preoccupied with keeping the roof from collapsing on them. Or maybe it had been because he’d known he could only take one thing from the crypt, and in that regard there had been no competition at all.</p><p>“Did you happen to see the other demons on your way in?” Crowley asked. “Last I saw them, they seemed quite keen on burning down more of the city, this time without my interference.”</p><p>Aziraphale opened his mouth to respond and then hesitated. Crowley had bounced back to his regular self a little more over the course of the day, seeming to be doing better with bearing the self-imposed weight of guilt for the city’s fate. Aziraphale hoped his presence was helping with that, but he didn’t want to do anything that might push Crowley back to where he had been. Like telling him that it was, however indirectly, his fault that Aziraphale hadn’t dealt with the demons. Though Aziraphale fully accepted responsibility for his actions, he knew that Crowley wasn’t likely to see it that way, and putting that extra weight on him now seemed cruel.</p><p>So Aziraphale swallowed his words. “No,” he said instead. “I didn’t. Must have just missed them.”</p><p>Crowley nodded, accepting Aziraphale’s answer. “Hell must be pleased with their work. They might even be getting medals right now.”</p><p>“Hmph,” Aziraphale said, draining the last of his soup. He had to admit the image irritated him, but it was a small price to pay for having Crowley safe and sound beside him.</p><p>“I never said,” Crowley began, fixing his gaze firmly on the blackened ground in front of them, “but…thank you. For rescuing me. And it was…hell’s teeth, Aziraphale, it was one hell of a rescue. I can’t believe you were keeping that tower up the whole time.”</p><p>Aziraphale looked over at Crowley and saw the demon smiling at him, but hesitantly, like he wasn’t sure how his attempt at levity would be received.</p><p>Aziraphale returned his smile and stood, offering to take Crowley’s soup cup. “Well, I must admit it wasn’t exactly what I’d had planned, but the fire had other ideas.”</p><p>Crowley gave a faint laugh and handed Aziraphale his cup.</p><p>Aziraphale stacked it on top of his own and prepared to move away, then hesitated. “Also…I’m sorry if it seemed like I was mad at you on the boat. I was just…processing some things. But I never did blame you for any of this, and I wish you’d have stayed, in Southwark.”</p><p>Aziraphale didn’t look at Crowley, but he could feel Crowley’s eyes on him.</p><p>“I wish I had, too,” Crowley said at last, softly.</p><p>Aziraphale gave an awkward bob of his head. “Well,” he stammered. “I’ll be right back.” He started off towards the man with the soup cart to return their cups.</p><p> </p><p>🔥🔥🔥</p><p> </p><p>Crowley watched Aziraphale go, feeling somehow much lighter than he’d thought possible that morning. Despite everything that had happened, somehow Aziraphale didn’t hate him for it. And it wasn’t just that Aziraphale had taken him back; Aziraphale hadn’t even rejected him in the first place. Aziraphale had been forcibly reminded of the worst part of Crowley’s nature, and this time he had decided that that didn’t matter to him.</p><p>Crowley didn’t understand what had changed between them, exactly, that Aziraphale should extend such kindness and acceptance to him, but he was profoundly grateful for it. He wasn’t going to have to spend the rest of the century alone after all. Aziraphale was going to stay with him.</p><p>He ran a hand lightly over his opposite wrist, feeling the unevenness of the skin there, scarred from the burns. He could still remember the feeling of the chains digging into his skin, growing increasingly hotter as the metal absorbed the blazing heat of the crypt. He knew he ought to dedicate some more magic to healing the scars, but not tonight. He was running rather low from the day’s endeavours, and he’d need some tomorrow, when they resumed sifting through the debris that had once been London.</p><p><em>Or might even need some later today</em>, Crowley thought, looking down at his rumpled, ash-coated clothes. He hadn’t had the opportunity to change since Beelzebub had appeared with her orders, and what had started as a perfectly respectable outfit now looked fit for a beggar. Of course, most people didn’t look much better these days, but he could at least miracle away the worst of the grime before tonight.</p><p>Especially if Aziraphale intended on making good on his offer of lending Crowley a place to sleep for the night; the angel wouldn’t be very keen on Crowley tracking dirt into the same room that housed his beloved books. He had to admit he was still a little surprised Aziraphale had made the offer, but he was glad that he had. He hadn’t much liked huddling in Moorfields, but he hadn’t had any other place to go and hadn’t felt up to interacting with strangers long enough to find himself proper accommodation.</p><p>The angel was heading back towards him now, walking swiftly and determinedly across the blackened ground of the churchyard, and Crowley felt a pang of fondness mixed with gratitude.</p><p>As Aziraphale neared, Crowley saw he had a wide, relieved smile on his face, though he quickly stuffed it out of sight.</p><p>“Crowley! The man selling the soup gave me some news: a messenger just came over, and they have a count of those killed by the fire.”</p><p>Crowley’s newfound optimism crumpled, his stomach twisting itself into knots. Though he had sorely needed the soup, he began to regret it now, feeling slightly ill. “Oh?”</p><p>“The number—well, they can never be very accurate about these things, you know how it is, but it has to be in the right neighbourhood, surely.”</p><p>“How many?” Crowley forced himself to ask, dreading the answer but also wishing Aziraphale would just spit it out already.</p><p>Aziraphale looked at him, his fluttering hands stilling. “Only six, my dear. In total.”</p><p>Crowley blinked at him in shock. “Six? Six hundred, you mean?” He steeled himself. “…thousand?”</p><p>“No,” Aziraphale replied kindly, looking quite relieved himself. “Just six. Half a dozen. A maid where the fire started, an elderly watchmaker who refused to leave his house…”</p><p>Aziraphale kept going, but Crowley wasn’t listening anymore. <em>Only six</em>.</p><p>He put his head in his hands, unable to believe it. He could feel his fingers trembling. The maid’s death he still deeply regretted, but he had imagined her as just the tip of the iceberg, just the first in the long list of casualties to Hell’s purposeless cruelty, innocents whose only crime had been being described as sinful by Crowley in a pamphlet sixty years ago.</p><p>Hell may have succeeded in burning the city to the ground, but <em>only</em> the city. The buildings may be lying in brittle, blackened heaps all around him, but the wonderfully creative, ambitious humans who had built them in the first place still lived. And if they had built them once, then they could build them again, perhaps even better than before. Nothing had been truly lost—or, at least, very little had been.</p><p>
  <em>Only six.</em>
</p><p>“Crowley? My dear?” Aziraphale asked, and Crowley felt a light touch on his shoulder. He raised his head from his hands and gazed up at Aziraphale, feeling a warmth around his eyes.</p><p>“That’s great news, angel. That’s really, really great.”</p><p>Aziraphale smiled at him, looking just as relieved as Crowley felt. “It truly is.” He resumed his seat at Crowley’s side. “It certainly must have helped that someone raised the alarm so early.” He looked meaningfully at Crowley.</p><p>Crowley let out a relieved, choked laugh, and sat back, feeling better than he had in weeks.</p><p>“The other news is that Charles is officially discrediting rumours about the fire being set by French or Dutch agents,” Aziraphale informed him. “So that should at least keep tempers down. And it’s expected that there’ll be some proclamation soon about the rebuilding strategy, while Parliament drafts a law. I suppose they’ll try to put back together what they can before winter.”</p><p>Crowley nodded, still so relieved he felt giddy. “Is Westminster all right, then? I suppose they’re pretty far west.”</p><p>“Untouched,” Aziraphale confirmed. “Have you not seen where they stopped the fire?”</p><p>Crowley shook his head. “Been avoiding the news, too.” <em>Thought it would all be damning</em>, he admitted to himself.</p><p>“Oh!” Aziraphale said. “Well, most of the City burned—that’s the City of London proper, the walled medieval city. About three-quarters of it. And then some parts further west: a good deal of Holborn, Bridewell, Fleet Street…” Aziraphale trailed off for a moment, his voice shifting strangely in tone. Then he hastily switched tacks. “But Westminster, Soho, Covent Garden all safe, as well as Southwark and everything east of the Tower, though admittedly there’s not much there.</p><p>“From what I’ve heard, it sounds like Charles really is doing an exceptional job handling the crisis. It’s all over the city that he rode out personally to fight the fire, along with the Duke of York. He’s even handed out thousands of pounds’ worth of wood for rebuilding—burned, of course, but still usable.</p><p>“Plans for rebuilding are already being drawn up, or so I’ve heard. A friend of mine knows a certain Christopher Wren, and apparently he was here just the other day, down from Oxford and scrambling all over St Paul’s. He already has a plan for redesigning this whole area. Widening the streets so one can actually see in broad daylight, adding big plazas, straightening out the roads…”</p><p>Aziraphale kept talking but Crowley’s mind started to wander, just letting Aziraphale’s voice roll over him. He had always been a fundamentally optimistic sort of person, and only now did he see how much of that he had lost sight of in the last weeks. The catastrophe had seemed so immense, so insurmountable, that he had been sure there would be no recovery, but now…Already humanity was working to make it right. And as long as there were still people willing to make it right, Crowley knew that, one day, it would be.</p><p> </p><p>🔥🔥🔥</p><p> </p><p>The rebuilding of the city leapfrogged in the years following the Fire, starting with the Royal Exchange and livery halls. Several dozen burned parish churches went up as soon as money was available, following the pace of the rebuilt homes.</p><p>While many of Britain’s finest minds put forth proposals for a new street plan based on broad boulevards and geometric plazas, in the end the Londoners put it back just how it had been, salvaging their city from their own memories instead of the visions of their leaders. In any case, it was far too much work to re-parcel all the land, not to mention prohibitively expensive. Improvements were at least made to the building code, though, widening many roads and standardizing housing styles. Importantly, jetties and other overhangs were banned, and brick and stone were designated as the core building materials of all new structures.</p><p>Throughout it all, Crowley and Aziraphale helped humanity along where they could. When Christopher Wren was assigned the task of rebuilding St Paul’s, Aziraphale quickly befriended him and set about reporting to Heaven all of his good deeds associated with the raising of a glorious new house of God. Robert Hooke—the very same who had written Aziraphale’s prized <em>Micrographia</em>—joined the surveying team as well and was assigned the project of building a monument to the Fire. Crowley spent several hours a week ‘overseeing’ Hooke’s progress, though he was often interrupted by Aziraphale dropping by both to see him and to pester Hooke about his squandered literary talent. Despite these distractions, Crowley found time to send Hell his own progress reports about the building of a glorious monument to the carnage Hell had wreaked. In reality, the monument was to the efforts of the Londoners who had <em>stopped</em> the fire, but Crowley didn’t bother Hell with the details.</p><p>Wren, at least, turned out to be a handful and a half. It didn’t take Aziraphale’s encyclopaedic knowledge of architectural history to know that the man had never been classically trained, and the parish churches scattered throughout the city were a testament to that. Every one, it seemed, was an experiment in stone, Wren just tossing together elements in the hopes that he might stumble upon something magnificent.</p><p>And, in the end, he did. It took the better part of forty years to rebuild St Paul’s Cathedral, Aziraphale watching with some alarm as Wren repeatedly deviated from the approved plans apparently whenever he felt like it, redesigning as he went. While a mildly stressful experience, in the end it had been worth it.</p><p>The new St Paul’s was a mixture of English baroque and classical, a colossus of pillars, pediments, and pilasters. And, though it certainly flaunted every law of architecture Vitruvius had ever codified, it had a charm all its own.</p><p>“What do you think of how it turned out?” Aziraphale asked, moving his gaze from the immense silvery-blue dome of the cathedral to Crowley. The two of them were sitting on a low stone railing atop the tower of St Augustine’s, a parish church just a single street away from St Paul’s. It was one of Wren’s projects as well, and Aziraphale had to admit he found the shape of the steeple a bit strange, but the tower was nice and tall, affording anyone atop it a wonderful view of the cathedral that was Wren’s masterpiece.</p><p>Crowley’s eyes shone as he looked at the building before them: St Paul’s, reimagined. “Not half bad, angel. Not bad at all.”</p><p>Aziraphale couldn’t have agreed more.</p><p>“I still miss the old one,” Crowley commented, tapping his heels against the stonework ridging the top of the tower. “But this one’s nice too, in its own way.”</p><p>Aziraphale nodded agreement. “And now history will have them both.”</p><p>Crowley smiled. “That it will.”</p><p>They were silent for a moment, birds chirping as they soared overhead and the sounds of traffic rising up all around them. London had returned to its usual self, the Fire now just a distant memory in the minds of the older half of the city’s population.</p><p>“It really is a terrific monument, don’t you think?” Aziraphale asked.</p><p>Crowley snorted. “What? To Heaven?”</p><p>Aziraphale looked over at him. “No, to humanity. Weren’t you always the one saying churches belonged to their builders or some such?”</p><p>A look of surprise crossed Crowley’s face, and Aziraphale realised he’d assumed Aziraphale had forgotten all about that. “Yeah, actually.”</p><p>Aziraphale smiled kindly. “Well, I think it is. A grand monument to the resilience of humanity. The cathedral burned in the Fire, but here it is again: renewed. Humanity at its finest.”</p><p>Crowley hummed agreement. “And also…” he began and then trailed off almost immediately.</p><p>“Hm?” Aziraphale prompted when Crowley remained quiet.</p><p>“Oh…nothing,” Crowley said, knocking his heels against the stonework almost nervously. “Just…Londoners. Putting the city back together the way it had been before, and…and working together to rebuild what had been torn down, regardless of what their superiors wanted.”</p><p>Aziraphale looked over at the demon, noticing the double meaning and wondering if it was intentional. From the way Crowley was staring resolutely at the cathedral, deliberately not looking at him, Aziraphale decided that it was. He allowed himself a warm smile. “I agree completely, my dear. A monument to Wren’s ability, a monument to humanity’s resilience…and a monument to friends sticking together. How’s that sound?”</p><p>Crowley made a show of shrugging, but his posture had relaxed. “Whatever you say, angel.”</p><p>Aziraphale smiled. “Then I say it’s a very fine monument indeed.”</p><p> </p><p>🔥🔥🔥</p><p> </p><p>Under a mile from where Crowley and Aziraphale sat rose a very different sort of monument. This one, the official Monument to the Great Fire of London, had been Hooke’s—and therefore Crowley’s—project. It had been built on New Fish Street, only a stone’s throw from where the fire had broken out.</p><p>Crowley had immensely enjoyed making Hooke second-guess every design he produced, but in the end a simple, fluted column was chosen, to be crowned with an urn of flames. Four stone reliefs ringed its square base, recounting the events of the Fire in text and image.</p><p>Portrayed there, it seemed to be a perfectly ordinary fire, caused by the folly of humans but defeated by them as well. Humanity as its own phoenix, destroying itself but just as easily renewing itself, better than it had been before.</p><p>Strangely enough, the most overt reference to the true events of the Fire came not from Crowley’s nor Aziraphale’s hands. Four years after the Monument had been completed, a large stone tablet was placed nearby, declaring to anyone who bothered to read it the true source of the conflagration. Though its words had been both envisioned and carved by fully human hands, its accuracy, by celestial standards, was irrefutable.</p><p>Its first line of text, carved in large block capitals, read:</p><p>HERE, BY PERMISSION OF HEAVEN, HELL BROKE LOOSE.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Author’s Note</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Hooray, you’ve made it to the author’s note! This is mostly going to be about the historical aspects of the story, though with quite a few more pictures than usual, because I found so many cool maps and engravings. :D</p><p>As is the case with my historical fics, the majority of the little details in the story are sourced from somewhere or another, but I’ll just hit the highlights here. (And I regret that there are <em>many</em> highlights, because I do like to ramble on.)</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>Old St. Paul's</strong>
</p><p>The St Paul’s in the story is now known as Old St Paul’s, though technically there were three other churches built at the site before this one. This St Paul’s was built between 1087 and 1314 and, as mentioned, was beginning to fall into disrepair in the early 1600s.</p><p>Luckily for us, we still know quite a lot about Old St Paul’s precisely <em>because </em>it was falling into disrepair. The sorry state of affairs spurred a big initiative to get people interested in the history of the church in order to raise money to fund restorations. And so, in 1658, just 8 years before the cathedral would be destroyed in the Fire, William Dugdale published his <a href="https://archive.org/details/historyofstpauls01dugd/page/n9/mode/2up"><em>History of St Paul’s Cathedral</em></a>, which documents the history and architecture of the building, including the tombs and monuments within. Even better, the book features a large number of beautiful engravings by Wenceslaus Hollar (“Mr Hollar”!).</p><p>Here's the book itself (which I did end up reading a significant portion of while in the pursuit of a single fact):</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>Because of Dugdale’s and Hollar’s joint efforts, we know that Old St Paul’s looked like this (view from the south):</p><p>
  
</p><p>(If the facade on the end of the transept facing you doesn’t look very medieval, that’s because it was added by the architect Inigo Jones in the 1630s as part of the restoration effort.)</p><p> </p><p>They also provided an extremely helpful floorplan (and one of the crypt, too)!</p><p>    </p><p> </p><p>And of course an engraving of the crypt itself. :D</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>As for the interior of the main church, here’s the choir, looking towards the rose window at the east end:</p><p>
  
</p><p>Hollar’s over-exaggerating the perspective in that last engraving, though, so for a more realistic view we can look at some illustrations from 1891 by H. W. Brewer, who used Hollar’s engravings as a basis.</p><p>Here’s a view of the crossing, looking east towards that same rose window. Note the choir screen at the edge of the crossing (at the top of the short flight of stairs)</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>And then the same view, but moved into the choir itself (compare with Hollar’s perspective!).</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>He also gives us a fine view of the entire church as it would have appeared before the loss of the spire:</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>The Fire Itself</strong>
</p><p>Given the enormity of the event, we have lots of existing sources about the Fire and its spread, many from eyewitnesses. Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn in particular kept very detailed notes in their diaries, which are worth checking out if you’re interested in learning more.</p><p>If you weren’t already acquainted with the Great Fire of London, here’s a contemporary map showing the destroyed area (436 acres, including 13,200 houses, 87 churches, and 44 livery company (guild) halls):</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>Here’s a newer map with better labeling of landmarks (many of which appear in the story):</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>Going back to Hollar, here’s St Paul’s in flames. :(</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>And here’s a contemporary woodcut of the entire city being engulfed—just look at that swirly smoke!</p><p>
  
</p><p>Note the prominence given to St Paul’s and the lack of buildings on the half of the bridge closest to the fire. These buildings had been destroyed in a fire several years earlier and hadn't been rebuilt; because of this, the Great Fire wasn't able to spread across the bridge to Southwark (yay!). Also visible in the foreground is Southwark Cathedral and the Globe Theater (the rightmost circular building with a flag).</p><p> </p><p>As a complete sidenote, one of the best illustrations of pre-Fire London is <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/London_panorama%2C_1616b.jpg">Claes Jansz Visscher’s 1616 panorama</a>. For its four hundredth birthday, <a href="http://visscherredrawn.com/index.php">Robin Reynolds recreated the panorama</a> with modern London (that link also includes a Shakespeare-themed game XD).</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>But back to the Great Fire! For a touch of color, here’s a painting from 1675 (view from the east; the Tower of London is visible at right):</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>Something else I stumbled onto quite by accident is <a href="https://twitter.com/richardwaghorne/status/1190723062070751232">this incredible photo</a> from the French newspaper <em>Le Figaro</em> showing Notre Dame’s nave shortly before the roof collapsed during the 2019 fire. The embers are bits of molten lead falling from the roof, which—like Old St Paul’s—was covered in lead.</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>Lastly, jumping to ways to fight the fire, here's a 1612 woodcut showing the use of firehooks and a bucket brigade.</p><p>
  
</p><p>The hook lying at bottom left is a fairly typical example.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>Only Six Deaths</strong>
</p><p>The official number of deaths caused by the Fire is indeed six, though several other people died in the days immediately following due to smoke inhalation and inadequate shelter.</p><p>Many historians believe the real number is more likely in the low hundreds. Analysis of shards of melted pottery excavated from Pudding Lane in 1979 indicate that the fire could have burned as hot as 1250 °C (2300 °F). This is well above the typical range for cremation, meaning that it may have been difficult for survivors sifting through the wreckage to positively identify human remains, thus resulting in an undercount of the dead.</p><p>That being said, it’s still a remarkably low number considering the size of the fire. Additionally, the numerous eyewitness accounts of Londoners fleeing the city with all manner of goods indicate that most people were more concerned about their property than their lives (which were thus presumably not in grave danger).</p><p> </p><p>One of those projects I mentioned doing on the Fire in undergrad was a series of augmented reality data visualizations. Here’s one of them in just normal video format, showing how the Great London Fire of 1666 stacks up against other major historic fires (including in death count).</p><p>Note that London is the earliest fire on this list (we have practically no useful data about any other fires pre-1800), so the later cities were more heavily populated, etc. Also, the San Francisco Fire of 1906 was caused by an earthquake, the additional effects of which aren’t taken into account in the data. Lastly, note that the Peshtigo and Carr Fires are wildfires, shown mostly to illustrate how city fires differ from wildfires.</p><p>The blue bar = damage (adjusted for inflation and currency)<br/>
The red squares = deaths (1 square = 1 death)<br/>
The orange circle = area burned</p><p>
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</p><p>The Carr Fire was included to be a more recent example for area comparisons, since it had been in the news at the time the video was made. For a more relevant comparison today, compare the Peshtigo Fire in the video (which burned 1,875 mi²) to the 2019–20 Australian bushfires, which burned around 72,000 mi².</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>Books in St Paul's</strong>
</p><p>Everything about the Paternoster Row booksellers stashing their books in St Paul’s is perfectly true, and was one of the things that gave me the idea to write this story in the first place. Sadly, some publishers were financially ruined by the destruction of their entire inventory, and in the days after the Fire scraps of paper from the books that had been stowed in the crypt were reportedly found as far as sixteen miles distant. :o</p><p>I couldn’t verify if any copies of <em>Micrographia</em> were among those that burned, though it’s likely given that the publisher and seller (John Martyn) had his shop near St Paul’s, and the book was published in 1665. In a sad twist of fate, we do have records that indicate that three hundred copies of William Dugdale’s <em>History of St Paul’s Cathedral</em> burned in the crypt of the very cathedral they described.</p><p>As far as I could tell, the only work that was entirely lost in the fire was the third volume of <em>Monasticon Anglicanum</em>, also by William Dugdale, which was undergoing production at the time. Not only were those pages that had already been printed lost, but the manuscript was destroyed as well. Dugdale remarked sadly that “the lamentable fire hath put an end to my determination.” However, here too human perseverance won out, and Dugdale ended up completely rewriting his lost manuscript and publishing the book in 1673.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>Rebuilding</strong>
</p><p>Since I mentioned the plans for the rebuilding of London, I thought I might as well show you a few of them. Though London was indeed rebuilt almost entirely as it had been before, the plans are interesting glimpses into the London that might have been.</p><p> </p><p>Wren’s plan (look at those plazas! very European of him):</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>Hooke’s plan (you can actually tell how to get somewhere!):</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>And for a bit of fun, here’s a bonkers plan by army captain Valentine Knight:</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>On a related note, here’s another of those videos I made, this one about the pace of the rebuilding. When the building turns blue, it means it’s been rebuilt!</p><p>
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</p><p>Not pictured are 34 additional parish churches which were destroyed but not rebuilt (and their parishes consolidated with their neighbors). The asterisks on the livery halls indicate that they were only partially destroyed. One livery hall (not shown) was not damaged.</p><p>You’ll notice that the buildings that are most closely tied to the economy and daily people’s working lives (the Royal Exchange and livery halls) were rebuilt much faster than the churches.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>Resurgam</strong>
</p><p>One of the earlier drafts of this story had another scene at St Paul’s that tied into a fun bit of history about the rebuilding of the cathedral. The scene ended up not fitting in very well and got cut, but the history itself is worth telling:</p><p>Soon after Christopher Wren had gotten approval for (one of) his plans for New St Paul’s, he went out into the ruins of Old St Paul’s with some workmen to conduct a survey of the site. Once he had found where he wanted the center of the new cathedral’s dome to be, he called for a workman to go fetch a flat piece of stone with which to mark the place.</p><p>The workman went and picked up (supposedly at random) a flat stone from the rubble and returned to give it to Wren. At this point, one of them realized that the stone (which was actually part of a gravestone) had a word engraved on it: ‘RESURGAM,’ meaning ‘I will rise again.’ This was taken by some as “a memorable Omen” (haha!), and Wren decided to commemorate the fortuitous event in the design of the new cathedral itself. So, if you look at the pediment (the triangle bit) of the southern transept of the current cathedral, you can see a phoenix rising from the ashes atop a stone labelled ‘RESURGAM.’</p><p>
  
</p><p>~*The more you know!*~</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>The Monument</strong>
</p><p>If you’re not familiar with the Monument to the Great Fire of London, here it is:</p><p>
  
</p><p>Though it may not look very tall with these buildings framing it in front, note the number of stories in the building behind it and the height of the people at its base.</p><p>For a more flat-on perspective, here it is in the 1720s, towering over absolutely everything:</p><p>
  
</p><p>Though the Monument is now in a rather out-of-the-way part of the city, this was not always the case; when it was built, it was just down the road from London Bridge.</p><p>Here’s a view from 1795, showing the straight line formed by Old London Bridge, St Magnus the Martyr (right at the foot of the bridge) and the Monument.</p><p>
  
</p><p>Both the Monument and St Magnus now seem hidden away in the city for the simple reason that the main thoroughfare in the area—the bridge—moved. In 1824, work began on New London Bridge, which was located 100 feet west of the old bridge. (Of course, the more interesting story is how THAT new bridge was later sold in 1968 to an American entrepreneur who had it dismantled brick by brick and shipped via the Panama Canal to Arizona, where it was reassembled and remains to this day, but that’s a story for another time.)</p><p> </p><p>So I’ll tell you a fun story about the Monument’s creation instead!</p><p>Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren had known each other rather well before the Fire, as they were both prominent scientists in the Royal Society. In 1664, Hooke was carrying out experiments in the tower of Old St Paul’s cathedral that involved him climbing onto the tower’s roof and dropping a plumb-line with a vial of mercury tied to the end down the tower’s interior (he was trying to see how changing air pressure affected temperature and volume). The height of the tower, which Hooke measured for this experiment and others like it, was right around 204 feet.</p><p>Fast-forward two years, to the city burning down and England’s brightest minds (including Wren and Hooke, who both had more experience with optics than architecture) being assigned the task of rebuilding London. Hooke was chosen to design the Monument, and what did this scientist-turned-architect immediately think of? St Paul’s, of course, and how useful it had been as a place to conduct experiments, with its tall, enclosed space free from potential disturbances caused by wind.</p><p>So Hooke did the only sensible thing for a scientist to do: he designed the Monument to be 202 feet tall with a hollow center, so that he could continue his previous experiments without significantly changing his testing conditions. The other interesting note about the Monument’s height is that it is located that exact same distance (202 feet) from Farriner’s house on Pudding Lane where the Fire started.</p><p>So Hooke, in choosing both the location and architecture of the Monument, picked 1) the height that would be the most use to him scientifically, 2) a location that held significance in regards to the Fire it was built to commemorate, and 3) a location that was highly visible and prominent (the foot of London Bridge). Bet you didn't think this boring old column held such meaning!</p><p>On a related note, the Monument was also built to be a zenith telescope, because Hooke never could decide on any one scientific discipline to pursue (and, indeed, at this time they were all very interconnected). Unfortunately, Hooke wasn’t able to use the Monument for his experiments, because, despite his best efforts, it still swayed a bit in the wind and vibrated from all the traffic passing by.</p><p>Also of interest (to me, at least, lol) is this sketch by Hooke showing an alternate design, with gilt bronze flames emerging from loopholes.</p><p>
  
</p><p>You’ll notice the phoenix atop the column. This was Hooke’s idea, but Wren talked him out of it on the grounds that the wind would catch on the spread wings and potentially knock the column over. Several other options were considered, but an urn of flames was settled on in the end.</p><p>Here’s Hooke’s original sketch for it—notice the dashed vertical lines in the center. Those indicate a hollow cylinder in the center of the finial—so that the zenith telescope could see the sky, of course!</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> <strong>Micrographia</strong> </em>
</p><p>Since we’re talking about Hooke, I’d be remiss if I didn't show you some pages from <em>Micrographia</em>. Just as you’d imagine, it’s a book about microscopes and what you can see with them. It is considered the first important work on microscopy, though Hooke is often better known for having coined the word “cell” (in biology terms).</p><p>Here are two of <em>Micrographia</em>’s most well-known engravings (the head of a drone-fly and a flea), the latter of which is printed on a large fold-out page:</p><p>    </p><p> </p><p>My favorite engraving, though, is this one:</p><p>
  
</p><p>“What is it?” you cry. “A dust mite? Some speck of bacteria? A distant star or planet?”</p><p>None of these. What you’re seeing is Hooke’s microscopic representation of that dot within the circle at the top, by the letter ‘A’. A period or a full stop, in other words. Punctuation’s finest portrait yet.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>Thomas Decker</strong>
</p><p>Blimey, this author’s note is getting long, but I just <em>have</em> to talk about Thomas Decker’s amazing 1606 pamphlet <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015029390849"><em>The Seven Deadly Sins of London</em></a>. As mentioned in the story, it roundly chastises Londoners for their wicked ways.</p><p>Decker goes on at length about groups of people he doesn’t like, but the type of person he hates the most is the “Politick Bankrupt,” a financier who uses his social charm to scam innocent people out of their money and then refuses to pay them back (and, indeed, often goes bankrupt himself).</p><p>For just a taste, Decker refers to such a person as “wrapping his crafty Serpents body in the cloak of Religion,” and compares them to “the rats that eat up the provision of the people…the grasshoppers of Egypt,” who “live without the freedom of honesty, of conscience, and of Christianity.” Sound like anybody today?</p><p>Anyway, Decker then proceeds to go on a two-page rant about the fate of such loathsome people. Here’s the best part (spelling and punctuation modernized; for the full effect it’s recommended you read it aloud and melodramatically):</p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>Their neighbors scorn them, strangers point at them, good men neglect them, the rich man will no more trust them, the beggar in his rage upbraids them. Yet if this were all, this all were nothing. O thou that on thy pillow (like a spider in his loom) weaves mischievous nets, beating thy brains, how by casting down others, to raise up thyself!</p>
  <p>Thou <em>Politick Bankrupt</em>, poor rich man, thou ill-painted fool, when thou art to lie in thy last inn (thy loathsome grave) how heavy a load will thy wealth be to thy weak, corrupted conscience! Those heaps of silver, in telling of which thou hast worn out thy finger-ends, will be a passing bell, tolling in thine ear, and calling thee to a fearful audit. Thou canst not dispose of thy riches, but the naming of every parcel will strike to thy heart, worse than the pangs of thy departure: thy last will, at the last day, will be an indictment to cast thee; for thou art guilty of offending those two laws (enacted in the upper house of heaven) which directly forbid thee to steal, or to covet thy neighbor’s goods.</p>
  <p>But this is not all neither; for thou liest on thy bed of death, and art not cared for; thou goest out of the world, and art not lamented: thou art put into the last linen that ever thou shalt wear (thy winding-sheet), with reproach, and art sent into thy grave with curses: he that makes thy funeral sermon, dares not speak well of thee, because he is ashamed to belie the dead: and upon so hateful a file doest thou hang the records of thy life, that even when the worms have picked thee to the bare bones, those that go over thee will set upon thee no epitaph but this: <em>Here lies a knave.</em></p>
</blockquote><p>And because I’m super extra and don’t know when to stop, I took an extract from the above and <a href="https://improbabledreams900.tumblr.com/post/617510498469068800/an-excerpt-from-thomas-deckers-1606-pamphlet-the">made it into an illuminated manuscript page</a>.</p><p>    </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>Some Small Details</strong>
</p><p>Almost done, I promise!</p><p><strong>London rocket:</strong> Given the time jump at the end of the fic, I wasn’t able to include this detail, but there was a small yellow flower that started growing in the ashes of London in the months following the Fire (and which grew especially thick around St Paul’s). This flower, named “London rocket,” was only ever seen in London one other time: 1945, after the “Second Great Fire of London” (the Blitz).</p><p><strong>Fire insurance:</strong> You remember Crowley musing about how things could have been different if people had had some sort of monetary protection during times of crisis? Well, Crowley’s about to invent fire insurance (which was, indeed, invented as a result of the Great Fire of London)!</p><p><strong>John Donne:</strong> So you remember that statue that fell through the crypt floor and conveniently allowed Aziraphale to rescue Crowley? Well, that’s a real statue of a man named John Donne, who was the dean of St Paul’s in the 1620s, just a few decades before the Fire. The interesting thing about this statue is that it’s the only memorial from Old St Paul’s that survived the Fire (and is, indeed, still at St Paul’s today!). After the Fire, it was salvaged from the crypt, though nobody knows quite how it got there.</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>Here, By Permission of Heaven</strong>
</p><p>Lastly, here’s the titular stone itself (it’s now at the Museum of London):</p><p>
  
</p><p>And, last but not least, a big thanks to my patient betas, doctortreklock and spinner12!</p>
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